Here comes wisdom on the road star-gazing
ladened with heavy-scented gifts
soon to be laid at the twin feet
as yet untested of an infant
without the slightest clue
of a gift’s real market value.

Did somebody in the benighted stable—
a woke shepherd? a bitter angel?—
foreshadow the sharp question
that was decades later to cut through
the cloud of expensive love
released from alabaster 
to fill a lonesome room 
in a town called Bethany
at the opposite end of this new life?

Why wasn’t all this sold
for cash remitted to the poor?
What’s a baby going to do
with pounds and pounds of costly myrrh?

Ask the have-nots if they had
these or queries of the like
on that most holy, silent night.