A Beacon, A Call

For Advent 2024, I had the opportunity to write some poetry about the Christian practice of reflecting on the birth of Jesus, on recognizing the darkness of the night yet preparing for the coming dawn. These themes resonated deeply in me – images of darkness and light, of past and future – and one poem quickly turned into a sequence of three intertwining pieces, which I am collectively calling Come the Dawn.

Over the past few weeks I've been publishing each of these poems, along with a short reflection on what they mean to me. The poem here, "A Beacon, A Call," is the first of the collection. If you missed the first two, you can read "A Shift, A Turn" here and "Snow, Delicate and Dangerous" here.

Look around at when we stand,
blind in this night with hope in our hands.
This beacon we hold so tight in our grasp
is flaring to life before us at last.

The dawn, see, it arrives, it arrives,
hope leaps to life, a light in the sky.
That silence we once felt lost inside
has come alive with this baby’s cries.

A celebration, a coronation,
shouts of joy – yes!
But has our long wait now ended
for us to lie down in rest?
No, the cry of this child,
is not a cry at all,
Hear in it a pleading, a warning,
a mission, a call.

For when we heed that hope
we carried for so long
we find it altered our souls
to sing a new song
of justice, of peace, of compassion, of love
because that’s what this baby, this child, is in need of
and that’s what I need, too,
and the one sitting next to you
and the one before us, behind,
we all have the same heart inside
beating for love 
and needing this love
from the cold advent of night
to the long burn of daylight.

Through that long wait we became
shining testaments of grace
not for praising ourselves
but to enlighten this place.

So let’s shine, let us shine
with the strength of this child
each day we take breath,
every moment we’re alive.

About This Poem

This poem is the culmination of the collection, written to be read aloud during Christmas Eve church services. The first two poems explored themes focused on darkness, hinting at the visions of light on the horizon. This one, on the other hand, begins with that light and asks what we are to do with the light we've found.

With Christmas, I often find myself tempted to celebrate that one day and then, the next day, move back into the routine of day-to-day life. But the power of Advent is that this isn't simply a day of celebration, but a step along the journey – a journey that continues long after the holiday is over. And it is our task as Christians to embrace the journey we've experienced in Advent and share it with the people around us.

One of my challenges in writing this was to make it feel traditional, since it was for Christmas, but to also break some rules to make it stand out. So I began with a familiar meter, almost Dr. Seuss-ical in its simplicity, and constructed it into an almost-symmetrical construction of stanzas. If I had gone fully symmetrical, the stanzas would have looked like this:

• 4 lines
• 4 lines
• 8 lines
• 8 lines
• 4 lines
• 4 lines

But I wanted to draw attention to the moment of Christmas – to the image of the baby in the manger and the way Christ's birth affects us as a community. So I broke the symmetrical structure just a little, constructing it like this instead:

• 4 lines
• 4 lines
• 8 lines
• 6 lines + 8 lines ("For when we heed that hope...")
• 4 lines
• 4 lines

In that misplaced stanza, the sixth line is this one: "because that’s what this baby, this child, is in need of." This line is where the symmetry breaks, and it is the longest line of the entire poem – it almost could have been two lines instead of one. This line becomes the central inflection point of the poem, where the meter and symmetry break just a little, throwing Listeners out of the rhythm they expect to hear.

When I read the poem aloud to the congregation, I paced it to climax during that 14-line stanza, then paused before moving into the final two stanzas, which are less about the journey itself and more about reflecting on the journey and challenging Listeners to not forget it.