Birth—Tania Runyan

We’ve invited Tania Runyan to be our next commissioned poet, and she has written five previously unpublished poems to help us think through and celebrate Advent. Tania has been creating poetry from the perspective of Jesus on her Substack, Poet Jesus. If you sign up, you’ll receive Tania’s (“holy ghostwritten”) quirky, funny, eloquent, and consistently wise take on Jesus poetically weighing in on topics like Gen-Z, the dentist, depression, the election, and what might happen if he actually did take the wheel. For these poems, we’ll hear from Jesus again—in utero.

Also, we’re running a holiday book promotion for the month of December. If you become a paid subscriber now, we’ll send you a thank-you book.

by Tania Runyan

No crying I make?
Of course I screamed
with that first shock

of air in my lungs.
You did your share of wailing, 
too, the sheep and cows 

bellowing in a chain reaction
that drove Dad to stuff hay 
in his ears. So many say 

they want incarnation 
but don’t really mean it. 
Any baby halo 

would have shattered
the first time I bit your nipple 
and you yelped. I see no 

inflatable placenta or pre-lit 
pig slop in the Wal-Mart
nativity displays. Mother, 

I know you know I am man 
and God. You felt the comets
streak through your uterus.

But most of the others won’t 
understand or will pretzel 
themselves out of belief. 

I’ll love them anyway, painfully, 
to the point where these spirit
-carbon cells might burst. 

I feel the future as clearly 
as this damp wind wafting
through the cave. Pull me 

closer, and for the first time, 
let’s look directly into each other’s 
faces as the universe swirls

and the temple curtain braces
to rip. All will be bright in our lives, 
Ama, but certainly not silent.

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Tania Runyan is an NEA fellow and author of the poetry collections What Will Soon Take Place, Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her first book-length creative nonfiction title, Making Peace With Paradise: An Autobiography of a California Girl, was released in 2022. Tania’s instructional guides, How to Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, and How to Write a Form Poem, are used in classrooms across the country, and her poems have appeared in publications such as Poetry, Image, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, and the Paraclete anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. She lives with her family in Illinois, where she works in educational publishing.