“Make Way” by Brent Newsom (poem)

Isaiah 40:3–5

This panting land
hawks up roadblocks
over ground hell-bent
against the premise
of a path. Desert
of rock, not dunes.
Hot wind
rattling leaves
of a distant, lone
acacia tree,
scraggly signpost
pointing everyway
into the craggy, cave-
laden wilderness.
Boulders big enough
to cast a shadow
one might shelter in,
or try, in the sun-fried
afternoon. The grade
grows steep
as the valleys deepen
like the dark of death.
Runnels of loosened
smaller rocks where rain
must once have rushed—
rain, in such a place.

What wildness welcomes
a road? What valley
straightens its spine,
what mountain stoops
from its jeweled throne?
But look: a path
flat and straight
through the jagged
crags and ravines.
A route between
two backwaters—
road enough
for a man to walk
beside a donkey,
on which might ride
a woman with child—
from Nazareth away
to Bethlehem. A way.

Originally published in Remembering That It Happened Once: Christmas Carmen for Spiritual Life All Year Long, ed. Dennis L. Johnson (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2021). Used by permission of the poet.

Brent Newsom is a poet from central Oklahoma. He is a recipient of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in poetry from the organization Poets & Writers and the Foley Poetry Prize from America magazine. He wrote the libretto for A Porcelain Doll, an opera based on the life of deaf-blind pioneer Laura Bridgman, and is the author of Love’s Labors (CavanKerry Press, 2015), which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award in poetry. His poems have also appeared in the Southern Review, the Hopkins Review, Windhover, Relief, and other journals.