Gifts - Bruce Dawe

When we have lavished on this sacred season

The best that marketing strategies can impart,

When we have bought and wrapped (beyond all reason)

Splendiferous offerings from the world of art,

When we have, tireless, tramped the nation’s highways

In search of this, or that, or even those

Indispensable gifts that modern skyways

Can bring within our compass, or disclose

A contemporary fashionable way

To match the Magi’s reverent visitation

To where the world’s messiah quietly lay

Sharing with stabled cattle habitation,

Waiting for the first faint streaks of day.

— How difficult then it is, when Mammon preaches

Bright sermons from each roof-top and sales-chart,

To remember what the Gospel message teaches:

That the greatest gift of all is the loving heart.