Conception—Tania Runyan

"Mother, I know those flashing lights and shadows shook you, but all is quiet now."

We’ve invited Tania Runyan to be our next commissioned poet, and she has written five previously unpublished poems to help us think through and celebrate Advent.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.

Take it away, Tania.

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

Mother, I know those flashing 
lights and shadows shook 
you, but all is quiet now. 

It it beautiful in here,
a bioluminescent river stippled 
with the sparks of your beating heart.
 
For seven days, I will divide 
and tumble down the path
to your womb as you sing 

of the humble and hungry
and meek. I can’t wait 
to meet them, to reach out 

an arm of flesh flecked 
with the dirt of the world!
To touch those worried faces

with the same hands 
that ripped apart the stars
to form them—yes, this

is what He’s knitting me to do.
But still, Ama, I’m scared.
You have no idea what’s coming.

For now, I will let you
dream of swaddling clothes
and stars, toes as small

as the pomegranate seeds
you lift to your lips. I will plant 
myself into the soft wall 

of your body where I will grow
into mine, where, Eli, Eli,
there is no turning back.

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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.