Though young, I wasn't ignorant. I'd heard the tales of other mothers.
Knew what to expect, I thought. Women must tell, afterwards,
must sometimes endlessly repeat in words the experience of giving birth,
as if to share the amazing burden.

Often I'd held a child wrapped tight in swaddling bands, listening, taking the weight
of memories too immense for one to bear alone. Women do this for each other,
and it hurts and heals. And even as my time crept closer this did not cease.
It worried me, but I watched the older women's faces too, faces tired and strong,
my mother's face among them, and drew strength. And trusted.

Then the blow fell. A journey to be travelled, just at the wrong time. Forty miles.
Most of us had never even left our village. The old were spared. Caesar had small
use for subjects who'd soon die. We were not subjects to him anyway, but objects,
his objects which he wished to count, as a child counts his toys.
We were part of his collection.

Well, my mother cried. She feared for me, feared for the grandchild whom
she'd longed to see. We had to give up all our plans of being together at the birth.
I almost had to mother her, it seemed, but she thought my confidence misplaced.
She fussed around the donkey, padding it out with mats, filling the panniers full
so that I could rest my legs on one side as we went. And holding conclave
with the two of us, Joseph and me. A man would be at the birth.
This was unheard of, yet she told him what to do.
Gave him a small knife wrapped in cloth,
and blessed us
both.

I was as a fine china cup, filled to the brim and jolted forty miles.
Finally, liquid spilled, as the black shapes of the town emerged,
pinpricked with tiny lights, distant in the dark. We weren't alone,
nor was the town quiet when we arrived. Amongst the crowd,
I saw a woman faint, almost unheeded among passing feet.
Joseph had gone for help.

Afraid, excited and alone, not all my listening to the other women
had prepared me for the waves of pain in which I felt I drowned.
I wanted my mother, felt like a child again,
wiping the tears away.

No one noticed. Everyone was upset and tired, anxious in the strange new place.
In any case we had got separated from our neighbours.
Then Joseph returned, to find me kneeling in agony,
lifted me in his arms to where we could be alone.
I was past caring where it was.

My dry lips whispered pleading prayers as each pain peaked. And yet, as the long
moments passed in the barn, resolve was born. Joseph and I had work to do.
Resolve was born first.

He'd spread with wool the straw bales where I lay, unpacked the panniers, offered me
fresh water from skin flasks, then poured the rest into a wooden bowl my mother sent
along. We knew what to do, the order of events. Though the pain grew till I was one
with the animals in the barn, mindless, instinctive, lowing like a beast,
I never lost sight of his eyes, intent above all on being there for me.
For the child.

At last the moment came. He knew. Kneeling beside me,
he placed the sole of my left foot against a stall post. The sole of my right foot he
placed against his own firm side, while I let life take me over.

It was in yielding that I did it. Out he swam, my little Lord, quicksilver as a fish.
I had a vivid image of him as he birthed - head, soft shoulders, flailing limbs, cast,
gasping, on to a pile of fleece. I couldn't help laughing in the midst of all.
Joseph, eyes shining, smiled his delight at first sight of the babe.
We did it. We did it together. We fulfilled our vow.
The child's sweet cry set seal on this reality.

I had felt wonder once before as great as this.
But that was as fleeting as the angel messenger.
Now I could hold the wonder in my arms, touch it with tender lips.
This was the Lord to whom I'd often talked, trusting he'd hear.
This was the Lord grown human life-size inside me.

Even the thought was huge, too huge for me to contain.
And yet I had contained it nine long months, in all simplicity.
It was the only way.

Later, washed and tidied, I lay nursing my little Lord. It was just he and I .
He who feeds the world, consenting to be fed. To be in need.
How could I be surprised when three kings came?
It was his due, as were the gifts they brought.
Nor was it strange when, after some time,
a fourth king offered the gift of death.

Even as Joseph packed the panniers for another journey, I knew this had to be.
This was another reality knocking on our door.
Part of the whole truth having to be absorbed, as, later,
the night absorbed three travellers moving on,
and the soft scuff of a donkey's hoofs
in the sand.