That Christmas comes
at the end,
in the final breaths
of a wasting year,
is best.
After the muscle-ache
of trekking graveside and back,
graveside and back;
after the haunting loneliness—
of beauty-gazing and solo-missions,
of incomprehensible party chatter,
of home without its people;
after the long war—
the blitzkrieg of unrelenting lies,
and the magnitude of battles lost;
after plundered strength
and fetters of pain
and soiled dreams shoved under the bed;
into the dull ache of life,
Christmas comes,
bearing this memory—
that into awful darkness
and the apparent silence of God,
Christ comes
in the end.
Gratefully His 