Maybe Christmas means a little bit more...

Far Away in a Manger (another new poem for the holidays)

Far Away in a Manger

Hail Mary, full of grace

Did childbirth hurt on that first Christmas

Or was labor immaculate too

Free of contact

Free of pain?

Blessed art thou among women

If that were truly the case

Pray for us in our hour of death

Because we seem to be racing toward it

O come, O come Emmanuel

To ransom faith from religion

To remind those who claim to follow

That love still covers multitudes of sins

Until the Son of God appears

Not that they’d recognize you today

Because you’re not white, or Protestant,

Or born in the United States

Rejoice! Rejoice! And mourn in lonely exile

Kyrie eleison! Christe eleison!

Oh, the little town of Bethlehem

Seems light-years and centuries away

From our land of the free

Our home of brave believers

Who disregard and disrespect the stranger

Who mock and ignore the poor

Who hide our nation’s sins under a bushel

And tear them from the pages of school textbooks

How far away is that manger now

As we trade no crib for a golden ballroom

And worship a painted calf

Parading in the skin of a bull

The only lowing of cattle

Is the bellowing

From the pulpits of government

The baby is crying

We should all be crying

Blessed is the fruit of thy womb

Of all wombs: red, yellow, black, white

Both foreign and domestic

Created in the image of God

Endowed with inalienable rights

The stars look down where they lay

To see what? —

Hail Mary, full of grace

Remember us in this, the hour of our death

We do not live in the blessings of the immaculate

We live in the world of touch and pain

Where beings from man to woman and back again

Must bump against

The bulk of the other

All day, every day, and I imagine all that bumping

Must be what causes us to hate each other

Enough to put people in cages, enough to bomb innocents

Be near me, I pray, our King of Peace. Amen. Amen.

© 2025 Sean Taylor

Keep Christ in Christmas? Here's How!

Incarnate (a new poem for the holidays)

Incarnate

They say the secret miracle of Christmas
Is Immanuel, God with us,
They say it is the Word becoming flesh
And dwelling among us.
I hear their words,
But I feel they miss the point:
We are already incarnate.
Here from the moment we stood upright,
The day we fashioned clubs,
The year we scribbled pictures onto cave walls.
God has always been with us
Because we were already here.

Some say the meaning of Christmas
Is the newborn king,
The Prince of Peace, the son given,
And yet again,
The words fail to reach
Our incarnate ears of flesh.
Lips praise peace, hands and wills abhor it,
A grand idea, but it’ll never work

In the real world of mucous and muscle.

A beautiful notion fluttering too high above the garbage
For us to attempt,
So we sing songs about it instead.

(c) 2025, Sean Taylor

When Religion Is Confused with Politics

Thoughts on the Murder of Charlie Kirk

 You don't take a man's life because you disagree with his statements, no matter how bigoted or backward. You don't take a father from his family because you think his words are dangerous. 

You don't do it if the target is conservative. You don't do it if the target is progressive. 

Words will always be dangerous. That's the promise of the Bill of Rights. You fight them in the public forums. You fight them with argument and voting and policy. Anything less is to deny the goals of our "great experiment" and devolve into chaos. The answer to existing chaos isn't deeper and more chaos. 

Even if he felt empathy was an idea made up by the "wokes," I still feel for his children reeling from the loss of their father, his wife mourning the loss of her husband. 

You can play the "but they..." game all you want to find ways to justify or condone or even revel in today's actions, but there is no level of "but they..." to justify it. 

And I'm once again reminded of what John Donne says far better than I can...

DEI and the Teaching of American Literature

For the record, as a lit/comp teacher, I integrate writing from all racial/cultural lines possible within a given unit. For example, for the founding documents section, we not only look at the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, we also read selections from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl so students can see how the US failed to actually implement life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness promises to those who weren't white, male, or land owners. 

In our unit on the Individual and Society, we examine writing from Booker T. Washington, Emily Dickenson, T.S. Eliot, and Walt Whitman, along with an extended study of American Born Chinese (the graphic novel). 

In our unit on Power, Protest, and Change, we look at the literature that confronted inequity and led to changing status and rights for women, workers, and African-Americans. This includes works by Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, Langston Hughes, Upton Sinclair, and an extended study of Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

In our unit on the importance of setting, I give my students a choice of Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Huck Finn (with parental approval), along with a few short selections including Judith Ortiz Cofer. 

In our unit on what America fears, in addition to The Crucible (and studying the Red Scare and McCarthyism alongside it), we also cover "The Masque of the Red Death" and how even in Poe's day, the rich set themselves aside in a place of safety, leaving the rest of society to suffer. 

In our final unit, we study and write short stories, including those from Alice Walker, Hemingway, Poe, Louise Erdich, Bierce, and Raymond Carver. 

Finally, the students are allowed to read a book of their choice, as long as it is written by an American author, and relate how the ideals and characteristics of American society and history are reflected in it (fights for freedom, equality, liberty, etc.)

Even with all this integration, I still feel it's important to set aside time as a nation to celebrate those who have been historically forgotten, abused, or even are currently being maligned. 

American literature and American history is the story of a baby country being born and still growing. Hopefully, we can realize that we aren't an adult country yet, but still a growing adolescent and learn that we are still trying to become a land of the free, where all people are created equal and have equal access (not just equal freedom) to the unalienable rights promised on our birth certificate.

And this is why I believe I've finally found myself as a Literature teacher and as a citizen.