It’s midnight. An Advent poem.

It’s midnight but we aren’t sleeping now.
The rumors fly: the thief is coming soon.
The master of the house is fast asleep,
Content, complacent in his bed behind
The bolted door. But we are wide awake.
Those bolts, to us, are not security.
Those bolts, to us, are prison bars. The Lord
Contently snoring locked us servants in;
He feeds us but the food is poisonous;
We will not taste his wine, for then we’d sleep.
We must not sleep. We must stay up and watch.
The thief, we’ve heard, is coming in the night
To break the bolts and set us captives free.