Jenna Wysong Filbrun – Epiphany

As many faiths lean into the spiritual essence of the holiday season, poet Jenna Wysong Filbrun returns to The Dewdrop with “Epiphany”. She blends her usual attention to the natural world with the depth of something more miraculous, more holy. “This poem evokes the festival of Epiphany, when many Christian traditions celebrate the arrival of the Magi with gifts for the Christ child,” Jenna informed The Dewdrop. “An example of radical inclusion, the mysterious presence of the Magi is one of my favorite elements of the Christmas story,” she concluded.

---

Epiphany

You don’t have to understand what you’ll find
in order to search for it,
say the wise ones over the desert
and the heart opening wide.

A woodpecker flies into the frozen
morning sky, a black speck
that flaps and dips over frosted
glass clouds as snow drops
like feathers over the dark wood
of the barn.

Knowing and going
are not the same
as understanding,
say the creatures
and the wind-blown clouds
and the water falling soft
and exquisite with cold.

I understand very little of living and dying.
But I have watched a beloved body go
into the ground, and it feels
like the cliffs in the high country
as water flows through it.
And birdsong. And wind in the trees.
The world spreads and rolls into the sky.
My heart flows out of my body to become
the earth that receives the body to hold
without knowing what will come of it,
except breaking and the notion
of something unspeakably holy
that feels like Presence
in the gaping absence.

Its sweet ache pulls me toward stars.
So I set out in good company
with gifts for the Love
I half know, half hope
is born at the end of it all.

---

Read On: Related Posts

• William Stafford’s Looking Across the River
• Gurdjieff and The Two Rivers
• Behind Me – dips Eternity – Emily Dickinson
• Pamela Wax – Capricorn Loses His Star
• Barry Casey – Wait Here