The Manger’s Complaint
By Jon Trott (Dec. 2006)
Your judgment seems flawed, your reasoning strange
To want to live there in my smell and wet straw
Your beauty, your wisdom, your heavenly power
How can my wooden ugliness hold You without flaw?
Your taste in surroundings leaves much unexplained
The waste of the beasts, their bleats, brays, and moos
How can “I Am Who I Am” shrink down to this?
A stable, a hovel, why here Your Good News?
Your love for the empty, the broken and small
Brings tears to the simple but seems wrong after all
You’re Lord of Lords and King of Kings
Not Master of Mangers and all Worthless Things.
I was used to the straw, each animal’s face
Why choose me to cradle You, Child of Light’s Grace
I hold the small limbs of Creation’s Head;
God’s Little Lamb Who makes all hearts His bed.
