This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Jenna Funkhouser.
Epiphany
Help me choose adoration
over understanding
when confronted with You.
Simply for the act of bowing
and offering
sages and elders once wandered
two years after a star.
They must have felt how often we deride
the pilgrimage of unknown destination
the dream-directed
the senseless offering of too much costly perfume.
Perhaps their honor
gave many more gifts:
star-sight to all whose paths they crossed
broader vision to their waiting homeland
courage to two faltering parents
who would soon take a dream-journey of their own.
Perhaps they returned
wider inside
ready with laughter
repented from saying, “I would never.”
Perhaps they never forgot
the way the morning star rose
in a blaze of crescent light
above them all.
Jenna Funkhouser is a multi-genre writer with published work in faith-based publications such as Voices of Justice as well as on her website, Downwind of Grace. Her first collection of poetry, Pilgrims I Have Been, was published October 2020. She sees her role as a poet as tracing the quiet workings of grace and is especially influenced by sacramental imagery and thought.
