The first in a series of new poetry for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany.
For each Sunday from Advent 2017 to Epiphany 2018, six exciting young poetic voices and one emerging digital artist reimagine the story of Christmas.
Taking the Biblical text as a starting point, they each retell a story that is both personal and universal, layering it with meaning and peppering it with insight. They bring to life the humans behind a familiar narrative, and enable us to see them, and hopefully ourselves, in a new way.
Doorway
by Antosh Wojcik
featuring the drawings of Stephanie K Kane
It is the sixth month of Gabriel’s anxiety dream.
He wakes seconds before & years later,
at Mary’s door. He had known this day
since he began and never known it.
He wakes at the beginning of every mouth in the story.
He wakes in text,
an event of knocking.
Reaching into his future depictions,
he chooses androgyny,
a face recognisable as all faces yet none.
Appear as human.
He crafts muscles.
Burls a heart into a chamber of feathers.
Revising what it means to be messenger,
Gabriel practices knocking in the mirror.
He remembers God appearing to Moses
as fire in the thistle bush.
For this woman who holds the birth of light
at her centre,
he must be as plain as a sentence.
At the door, he knocks with a wing.
How does an angel enter, he thinks.
She opens. In that moment, he sees her timeline pass
and in that, her un-born’s blood on the thistles and in that,
the resurrection and in that, the return.
Do not be afraid Mary, you will give birth to a son.
Even though he has foreseen
& lived this moment through all time,
he finally experiences Mary’s smile.
Let it be with me, just as you say.
How does an angel exit, he thinks.