Mary:
Another year is fading into the past;
the prophets’ words are waiting to come true at last:
I feel them moving within, small fists and feet—
the promises of God wrapped in skin breathlessly wait.
O Son of God, my darling, how can it be
that all our years of longing, all the mysteries,
are swaddled up in my womb while you delay?
O Child of Promise, when will you come? Is this the day?
All:
With Mary still we anguish till Christ is formed
in hearts where he is cherished, hearts by grace adorned.
And still his promise remains: “I’m coming soon!”
So we with Mary’s love and patience wait his return.
And now the whole creation groans to give birth
to sons of resurrection carried in the earth,
and as the promise draws near, so does the pain:
we groan together till he appears in flesh again.
O Son of God, our Saviour, no more delay!
Come quickly to deliver—end our travail day!
When your last promise comes true, all will be well,
for we shall be forever with you, Immanuel.
Written in the pangs of 2020, a Christmas carol! Or is it only an Advent hymn? Either way—no matter how much we rejoice in our Saviour’s first coming, it’s impossible to still the longing of our hearts for his second. And may it ever be until he returns! Merry Christmas, my friends. Our Lord, come!
Some notes. It’s impossible for me not to be disappointed with the recording I have to offer you. I could explain all the many inadequacies and mistakes you’ll hear, but suffice it to say I am no one-woman band! Anyway, the point of the recording is not to be played on your best speakers, but to invite any and all to adopt this song as your own.
My idea is that the first two stanzas are sung by a solo female voice as the voice of Mary. So often her birth is pictured as an emergency, almost happening on donkey-back on the way to Bethlehem, but that’s neither necessitated by the record nor the usual way things happen. Here she is imagined late in pregnancy, perhaps settled into an ignominiously shared space in the lower storey of her husband’s family home, being so over it, as many women feel at that time of pregnancy. Wherever she was that last month or so, even if she didn’t carry late—which is very common—she would have felt an intense longing to have her Child finally in her arms and not her womb.
At stanza three her longing is picked up by Galatians 4:19, Romans 8:19–25, and Revelation 22:17–21 as the whole congregation or choir sings the same love-song of gestation, this time spiritually, to our expected Saviour.
I have tried to facilitate instrumentation with my very meagre composition skills in the image below. There are a basic melody and bass harmony (which may not fit what is actually played in the recording) and guitar chords for a capo’d instrument (even better if you’re good enough to play in F major without a capo; I’m not, and originally played and sang this in the very low key of C). I took the dubious liberty of composing a song that ends each stanza on the dominant, then shifts to land on the tonic at the end. This creates the feeling for me of pressing forward into the next stanza—an impatience underlying the patience—and gives greater resolution to the end: “We shall be forever with you, Immanuel.”
May this song, such as it is, be a blessing to you this Christmas and for many to come.
By Babel’s Streams is a publication of free poetry. Songs, like this one, will be paywalled from January 2026. So if you like my music, please sign up or upgrade to a paid subscription to get access to all the work I produce. If you would like to support me in another way, you can Buy Me A Coffee.
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