Bringing a Gift

50 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Bringing a Gift My fellow Persian kings in purple robes, you have your frankincense, I have my myrrh, each his gift that he is sovereign of, a talent in the world to warm and love, and periodically I think it's good that we should suffer journey on the road, the stinging sand, high prices, awful food and being hounded by an errant star to culminate in kneeling in a barn to offer God our gifts, such as we are, though mine to you or yours to me may seem to be an ordinary, cheap perfume. Now even mine to me when I am kneeling at Goodness' Cradle lapses less appealing. Too arrogant, too always making fun, too over everything like the eye of noon, far too compensatory, too enthroned, too self-involved in love with my own tune, too total verbal toy have I become. Let me be poor like that boy with his drum. Let me attend like those attendant cows who bow to dine, their table is so low, who drop their verse of incarnation's smell, those vessels of four stomachs and a bulk of great intestinal coil, who suckle all, who are the earthly host and whose minds dwell a genius depth below I.Q. of zero. Mary laughs, "You need not bow that low:' JOHN MILBURy-STEEN ...