When Abraham was ninety-nine, they say,
three angels paid him visit at the oak.
The next year Isaac in his cradle lay
exactly as the visitors forespoke.
And Noah was six hundred when he made
the ark and filled it with his twos and twos.
Poor Moses’ hair was thin and steely grayed
when Yahweh told him to remove his shoes.
Elizabeth the Baptist John conceived
in autumn years and Simeon at brink
of death his Savior witnessed and believed.
If these in age did not from new grace shrink,
perhaps God calls me too from new frontiers
now that the barber has to shave my ears.
Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, Amethyst Review, Pensive Journal, Forma Journal, and The Society of Classical Poets. He is a certified catechist with the Archdiocese of New York, a Benedictine oblate of St. Mary’s Abbey in Morristown, NJ, and editor of The Catholic Poetry Room.