Baby Jesus Poem – the horror of divine omnipotence

On a noon at the end of Spring
I had a dream like a photograph.
I saw Jesus Christ descent to earth.
He came down the slope of a hill
Turned once again a child,
Running and rolling on the grass
And picking flowers to throw them away
And laughing in a way to be heard far away.

He escaped from heaven.

He was too much ours to pretend
Of the second person of the trinity.
In heaven all was false, all is discord
With flowers and trees and stones.
In heaven he had to be always serious
And from time to time to become man again
And rise on the cross, and being always dying
With a thorn crown all around
And the feet pricked with head nails,
And even with a cloth around the waist
Like the black people in the illustrations.

Not even they allowed him to have a father and a mother
Like all other children.
His dad was two people –
An old man called Joseph, a carpenter,
And that was not his father;
And the other a stupid dove,
The only ugly dove in the world
Because it wasn’t of the world nor a dove.
And his mother didn’t love before having him.
She wasn’t a woman; she was a suitcase
In which he came from heaven.
And they wanted him, born only of a mother,
And never having a father to love with respect,
To preach kindness and justice!

One day God was sleeping
And the Holy Ghost was flying,
He went to the miracle’s box and stole three.
With the first he made that no one ever knew he had run.
With the second he created himself eternally human and a boy.
With the third he created a Christ eternally on the cross
And left him nailed on the cross in heaven
And that is a model to all others.
Then he ran to the Sun
And descended on the first sun bean he caught.

Today he lives in my village with me.
He is a beautiful child of laughter and natural.
He cleans his nose to the right arm,
Jumps on pools of water,
Picks flowers and likes them and forgets them.
He throws stones at donkeys,
Steals fruit from the orchards
And runs crying and shouting at the dogs.
And, because he knows they do not like
And that everyone finds it funny,
He chases the girls
That walk in bands on the roads
With water cans on their heads
And raises their skirts.

To me he taught everything.
He taught how to look at things.
He points me all the things that exist in flowers.
He shows me how rocks are funny
When he holds them in our hands
And slowly stares at them.

He tells me horrid things about God.
He tells me he is a stupid and ill old man,
Always spitting on the floor
And swearing.

And Virgin Mary takes the eternity afternoons knitting.
And the Holy Ghosts scratches itself with its beak
And stands on chairs and shits on them.
Everything in heaven is stupid like the Catholic Church.
He tells me God do not understand
Of the things he created –
‘If he created them, which I doubt’ –
‘He says, for instance, that beings sing his glory,
But beings do not sing a thing.
If they sang they’d be singers.
Beings exist and nothing else.
That’s why they are called beings.’

And then, tired of talking jives at God,
Baby Jesus falls asleep in my arms
And I take him to my house.

He lives with me in my house halfway the hill
He is the Eternal Child, the missing god.
He is the human that is natural,
He is the divine that smiles and plays.
And that’s why I know for sure
That he is Baby Jesus, the true one.
And the child so human that is divine
Is this day to day life of poet, and it is because he’s always with me that I’m
always poet.

And that my smallest look
Fills me with sensation,
And the tiniest of sounds, whatever makes it,
Seems to talk to me.

And the new Child that lives where I live
Gives me one hand
And the other to all that exists
And that way we go through whatever path to be,
Jumping and singing and laughing
And enjoying our common secret
That it is to know all over the places
That there is not any mystery on earth
And that all is worth.

And the Eternal Child accompanies me always.
The direction of my stare is his pointing finger.
My attentive ear listening gaily to all sounds
Are tickles he does to me, playing, in my ears.
We go so well one with the other
In the company of everything
That we never think about each other,
But we live together and two
With an intimate agreement
As the right and left hand.

At nightfall we play the five stones
On the step of the house’s door,
Grave as is convenient to a god and a poet,
As if each stone
Was all the universe
And because of that a great danger to them
To fall on the earth.

After, I tell him stories of things of men
And he smiles, because all is incredible.
He laughs of kings and of the ones that are not kings,
And he’s ashamed of hear about wars,
And of commerce’s, and of vessels
That rest smoke in the air and on the high seas.
Because he knows that all misses the truth
That a flower was blossoming
And that goes with the light of Sun
Wandering on the hills and valleys
And hurting the eyes of plastered walls.

Then he falls asleep and I lay him down.
Take him in my arms inside the house
And lay him down, undressing him slowly
And as following a ritual very clean
And all maternal until he is naked.

He sleeps inside my soul
And sometimes awakes in the night
And he plays with my dreams.He turns ones upside down
Stack them on top of each other
And he claps his hands alone
Smiling at my dream.

When I die, little son,
Wish I’d be the child, the smallest,
Take me in your arms
And take me inside the house.
Undress my tired and human being
And lay me down on bed.
And tell me stories, if I awake,
To fall asleep again.
And give me your dreams to play until rising any day
You know which.

This is the story of my Baby Jesus.
For what understandable reason
Shouldn’t it be more truthful
That all philosophers think
And all religions teach?

The Herd Keeper, the eighth poem, Alberto Caeiro