Watching with Anna

 Luke 2 says there was a woman who spent day and night in the temple, for her whole life, just watching and waiting for anything that looked new. And then finally, she got to see. 

She can’t remember the last time
she had a better place to be.

“Night and day” the story goes,
she waits
in a temple, of all the places,
Silence is her bread,
prayer is her water.

She stays, all these years,
in the measured and marked space,
the only room,
they have decided,
where a God might meet a woman,
widow to a long-ago lost man,
daughter to a long-ago lost father,
member of a long-ago lost tribe,

who still believes there might be
something worth seeing.

She keeps watch,
looking for a new life
to match the old descriptions,
of what a life can be,
Something like a tree,
they wrote.
Somehow exactly like,
yet nothing like,
A king.

Others come and go
presuming there is nothing left to see.
“if there is anything new,”
they say,
“it will have to come to me.”

But she is still waiting.
Still watching.
Still listening.
Still hoping.
She is
Still.

And when this child,
This Brand New,
This Old Tree,
This Close-up Redeemer
Who had been her Far-off Dream-
When this child is close,
she knows she was right
to show up every day
and wait:

“I have seen something worth it,” she says.

And with the beautiful brown child-God-eyes on her,
she hears a Voice she knows,

“In you Anna,
I have seen something worth it.”