Her name is Willa.
She is taller than I am.
She speaks softly.
She loves candles,
ones that smell like fir trees
and ones that smell like roses.
Her blond hair is curly all over.
She likes to wear forest green
and magenta together,
and brown boots she
says she’s had forever.
Wore them in the stable
when she went to visit
the baby. It was so cold
she also wore her brown-tweed coat.
She says she remembers
the sweet scent of hay and hide,
the steady chomping of
the animals gathered round
that rickety manger,
as if there was nothing
special about God
being born bona fide
blood and bone snuggled
in the straw to keep warm,
which was when, she says,
she saw streams of light
begin to flow into the barn
and into every cranny in her body.
Or at least that is how
she explained why she’d come
to bring that light
to help us find a way through
this season of silence,
the dark waiting of
the hoped for unknown.
When she leaves
I hear her wings
whisking the cold air.
Emily Blair Stribling
Advent Calendar
Dawn of a New Day