A Lamb Is Born and Other Poems: Story Poems from the Life of Christ from the Manger to the Cross, Pentecost, and Paul

These are Christian poems, each telling a story based on some incident in the New Testament, usually something in the life and ministry of Christ. The birth story, told by the innkeeper’s wife, the story of the boy with the loaves and fishes, the widow who gives away her last two coins, the Syrophonecian woman with the possessed child, the crucifixion as seen through they eyes of a young Mark, and the woman with the issue of blood are some of the stories. These people’s lives are changed totally by their meeting with Jesus. You can see that Jesus is beginning to build a church, and these people may well become part of the Christian movement later on. These poems are in rhyming couplets. The rhyme is really secondary to the story, but makes these stories very readable–especially when read aloud. It also makes them memorable as certain phrases tend to lodge in your mind and cause you to think about the story. Poetry tells a story with the fewest words possible, and gets the relevant facts in very concisely. They become very moving in their directness. These stories could have been written in prose, but would have been much more wordy and much less memorable.