Poem for the First Sunday of Christmas

First Sunday of Christmas  December 27^th

The Song of the Shepherds

We were familiar with the night.

We knew its favourite colours, 

its sullen silence 

and its small, disturbing sounds, 

its unprovoked rages,

its savage dreams.

We slept by turns, 

attentive to the flock. 

We said little.

Night after night, there was little to say, 

But sometimes one of us,

skilled in that way,

would pipe a tune of how things were for us.

They say that once, almost before time,

the stars with shining voices

serenaded

the new born world. 

The night could not contain their boundless praise.

We thought that just a poem — 

until the night 

a song of solar glory,

 unutterable, unearthly,

 eclipsed the luminaries of the night, 

as though the world were exorcised of dark

and, coming to itself, began again.

Later we returned to the flock.

The night was ominously black. 

The stars were silent as the sheep.

Nights pass, year on year.

We clutch our meagre cloaks against the cold.

Our ageing piper’s fumbling fingers play,

night after night, 

an earthly echo of the song that banished dark.

It has stayed with us.

Richard Bauckham b. 1946

Richard Bauckham is a leading New Testament scholar.  Here he places a scholar’s learning alongside a poet’s imagination to get inside the experience of the shepherds.

From the first line of the poem, at an ominously black time of year, let’s go with the shepherds from their night after night, to share the song of glory that banishes the dark and can stay with us always.

Tina Lamb