Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord by Patrick Theron Erickson

If you would judge
the Godhead by size
by bulk and weight

what measure would you use
and what scales

when the Spirit
for whom no circumference
is adequate comes in
bodily form as a dove?

O man of contemptible
littleness of thought
concerning the greatest of things*

what of that mustard seed
the kingdom of heaven
or the pearl of greatest worth
swathed in swaddling cloths

what is he compared to
the great adversary
who is called leviathan
king of that which dwells
in the deep

this pearl subject
to no pearl fishermen
who stirs the deep
at his baptism?

*Gregory of Nazianzus, "Oration on the Heavenly Lights" XVI

Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City, just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. Besides a chapbook, Better Late Than Never (The Orchard Street Press,2022), his work has appeared in Quiet Diamonds: The poetry journal of The Orchard Street Press, Summer 2021, and in Penwood Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Sheila-Na-Gig online, among other publications, and more recently in Smokey Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, The Charles Carter, and Shift.