Why do you think your savior 
came to you under cover
of the night, under sentence
of death? You will say he came

in darkness to show us
the Light. I will tell you in response
that he came to you in darkness
because he was most comfortable

there.  After all, he himself
was dark, his parents were
dark — the ones you could see
as well as the One you could not.

What we know of his life
is mostly nothing — think
of all those missing years:
dark rooms in which he matured.

He was at the end taken 
by soldiers in the dark
and on the day he died,
they say the sky itself

went black to welcome him.
All this talk of him
as light of the world
is misinformed:

he was dark embodied,
yet in the name of easy vision
you’ve made Dark Evil 
and Light, Good. You put his birthday

near to your shortest day
and claimed it was
to recognize the coming of light,
but what if he came at Solstice

to celebrate darkness and your longest night?
You’ve ridden for years against
the dark peoples of the world
claiming you were bringing them

Light, but we didn’t need more Light.
Before you came we mostly
had the balance right, yet you hanged us
like lanterns and set us ablaze

and called it salvation when we
fell to our knees and balled ourselves up
like black stones as protection against it all. 
You think your savior set this path

for you.  You think he’s out there
at the blinding white end of it.
No. If he’s anywhere,
he’s back here with us,

with living and dead
holding us tight to himself and each other
in the warm embrace
of the much maligned night.