Welcome back to the Daily Poem, podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, December 22, 2023.

And if you were listening to this poem as it airs, then Christmas is very close.

If you have been longing for this for many, many weeks now, perhaps many,

months, depending on your age, congratulations. You have just about finished your race with endurance.

If you are still laboring to get a few

or a lot of last minute things done,

best of luck to you, but congratulations

to you too. You are nearing the end

of your labors.

And because we are nearing

Christmas and the bright and festal and very traditional hallmarks of Christmas are all around you,

I thought today would be a good day for a poem that gives us another view of Christmas, particularly the very first Christmas.

Today's poem is by T.S. Eliot, and it is The Journey of the Magi.

And in it, Elliot imagines what the aftermath of the first Christmas must have been for one of the wise men

who traveled from the east, Persia somewhere to Bethlehem in order to see the Christ child

that the star had led them to, only to discover or only to fully realize later

that what they would discover, what they would find there in the manger, would make some

demands upon them and really require a death of much of what they used to call life.

Here is the journey of the Magi.

The cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey.

The ways deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter.

...