That Dazzle Child, Rose’s Christmas Poem for 2011

That Dazzle Child

by Rose Rosetree (c)

Adult beauty will stop you. Just ask that movie star next to you at Starbucks, “H-e-l-l-ooooo?”

Assuming that you can talk at all. 

But the beauty of a sacred Christ child can stop you

and drop you

straight into awe.

It’s all about the child. Christmas means a state of being in holiday

that is all in awe about one tender child.

But did you ever ask why? I’m asking you now.

Is it the promise? That miniature body does contain all it will need:

Like the ultimate holiday gift, everything inside (and so very perfectly wrapped).

Is it the perfection? You might want to examine all 10 tiny fingernails, searching for clues.

Where, exactly, does that holy babe’s perfection show most?

Go, frustrate yourself forever in that.  

Do the Big Game Hunter’s Treasure Quest. Go find

how, precisely, perfection can be everywhere, eternally, equally, now.

Symbols won’t stop you the way a baby can. Nowhere on earth will a mere symbol stop you.

Because symbols are, literally, littering up the whole world.

Symbols in every person. And every part of a person.

Symbols in every deed. And every moment before the next deed.

Symbols in every place. Every pocket within blank space

(where God, laughing there, plays eternal peek-a-boo).

All human life is symbolic, the most amazing symbols in all the universe

right here, in our familiar world. Because those symbols are so prevalent,

tucked into everything: Every edge, roller-coastering around corners and curves,

on walls, flooring you, under and beneath and within every infinite ceiling.

God hides in every place, every space, every face, every trace.

Past our own babyhood, we can forget the wonder of all those symbols.

Until a baby, a Christ child, stops us

being not merely a symbol of God, like everyone and everything else,

but also a new kind of dazzle.

Therefore That mere kid stops us, punctually, once in a year.

How will I, personally, await that dazzle child this year?

I wish that this could be the year

when the usual awe stops me live in my tracks,

only from then on my adult world keeps on moving,

replete with all the usual splendid, confusing, surreal, creative symbolic details,

with my participation more or less normal,

only what if this year, finally,

I would never emerge from that awe, not for even one human second?

Instead I will live

in that Christ child’s same kind of miniature, breathing, NOW.

Copyright (c) by Rose Rosetree 2011