7 Poems for the Christmas Season
One of the hardest things for me during the season of lights, family activities, travel, and feasting is to slowwwww down and access awe. As a parent in particular, I feel like there’s so much focus on creating meaning and wonder, on curating experiences, and managing the emotions and schedules of others that there’s often "the crumbs” left for me to contemplate or savor.
So, in a spirit of slowing down, I want to offer seven poems that you may have not read before, ones that are new to me this year as well. I invite you to light a candle, get a cup of hot tea or coffee, pause between each one to let your imagination wander and your creativity quicken. Receive the gift of words, and bless you friends, this full time of year.
The Coming
R.S. Thomas
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
Thomas, R. S. "The Coming." Collected Poems, 1945-1990. London: Phoenix, 2000. 234.
Christmastide Sonnet 3: Refugee
Malcolm Guite
We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,
Or cosy in a crib beside the font,
But he is with a million displaced people
On the long road of weariness and want.
For even as we sing our final carol
His family is up and on that road,
Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,
Glancing behind and shouldering their load.
Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower,
Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled,
The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,
And death squads spread their curse across the world.
But every Herod dies, and comes alone
To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.
Guite, Malcolm. "Christmastide Sonnet 3: Refugee." Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year. Norwich: Canterbury, 2012. 16.
In the Days of the Angels excerpt
Walter Wangerin Jr.
III.
In the days of the angels—
The hair on the necks of the people,
Didn’t it stand like static?
In the days of the angels—
The air at their ears, the cloud in the heavens,
Didn’t it crack like a solid?
In the days when the angels dropped,
Discharging news in the troposphere—
Could such electric language not
Have shot the nerves of the firmament
With signs? Signs?
White words and understanding?
Skin,
The abdomen,
And deep the human womb,
Must have been
Tympanic then.
Ho! In the days when archangels spoke—
Wasn’t the scent of the weather ozone?
Tasting of seltzer and ions?
And the look of the air thereafter—
Wasn’t it crystalline, cleaner,
Dimensioned by nitrogen oxides,
Even as somebody’s breathing
Swells with well-being?
Wasn’t the breeze of the evening green?
Surely the people perceived
That angels were immanent, speaking:
“A son—“
Now there’s a bolt to strike an old man dumb.
One hundred bidders in the courtyard,
Jews devout at the hour of incense,
Should have been shocked in their nostrils,
Charged by a nitrogous excitement,
Their blood a rush of bubbles.
“A son—“
Let a maiden grab her skirts and run.
Let citizens stare after her,
Stunned, wondering
Why Modesty goes forking through the streets,
Her knees indecently aflame,
Her hair unpinned, a fume on the wind:
“Cousin! Cousin, I’ve such a thing to tell you!”
“A virgin’s Son—“
And the father who had not engendered it
Sprang from his pillow,
The crack of prophecy still ringing in his ears.
Surely Nazareth was startled with the man,
Surely Galilee!
Surely Rome
At such an impossible pop of lightning
Moaned in her sleep.
“A Savior!“
Then all the stars, the wheeling galaxy, streamed down
Exploding songs of fire across the firmament,
Sheeting the fields of shepherds in a flaming rain,
Gloria, roaring: Gloria in altissimis Deo,
The storm of heaven striking earth,
All angels in a fusillade!
Could anyone, could anyone have stayed asleep
When the whole air burned electric blue
And every hair on every head was singed?
Well,
If they did
They smelled the smoke in the morning
And did not understand
It was themselves
Whom God had
Scorched.
But the leaves grew greener in their season.
The vines were nourished by the nitrogen.
Oh, grapevines comprehend an angel’s discharge—
And vineyards that year produced a wine so red
That fools who lifted glasses to the sun
Were made uneasy by the crimson lens
And the dim suspicion
They were drinking blood.
Wangerin, Walter, Jr. "In the Days of the Angels." The Manger Is Empty: Stories in Time. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994. 175-177.
Restoration
By Mary Cornish
Everyone knew the water would rise,
but nobody knew how much.
The priest at Santa Croce said, God
will not flood the church.
When the Arno broke its banks,
God entered as a river, let His mark high
above the altar.
He left nothing untouched:
stones, plaster, wood.
You are all my children.
The hem of His garment, which was
the river’s bottom sludge,
swept through Florence, filling cars and cradles,
the eyes of marble statues,
even the Doors of Paradise. And the likeness
of His son’s hands, those pierced palms soaked
with water, began to peel like skin.
The Holy Ghost appeared
as clouds of salted crystals
on the faces of saints, until the intonaco
of their painted bodies stood out from the wall as if
they had been resurrected.
This is what I know of restoration:
in a small room near San Marco,
alone on a wooden stool
nearly every day for a year,
I painted squares of blue on gessoed boards—
cobalt blue with madder rose, viridian,
lamp black—pure pigments and the strained yolk
of an egg, then penciled notes about the powders,
the percentages of each. I never asked
to what end I was doing what I did, and now
I’ll never know. Perhaps there was one square
that matched the mantle of a penitent, the stiff
hair of a donkey’s tail, a river calm beneath a bridge.
I don’t even know what I learned,
except the possibilities of blue, and how God enters.
Of the Mystery of the Incarnation
by Denise Levertov
It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.
Descending Theology: The Nativity
by Mary Karr
She bore no more than other women bore,
but in her belly’s globe that desert night the earth’s
full burden swayed.
Maybe she held it in her clasped hands as expecting women often do
or monks in prayer. Maybe at the womb’s first clutch
she briefly felt that star shine
as a blade point, but uttered no curses.
Then in the stable she writhed and heard
beasts stomp in their stalls,
their tails sweeping side to side
and between contractions, her skin flinched
with the thousand animal itches that plague
a standing beast’s sleep.
But in the muted womb-world with its glutinous liquid,
the child knew nothing
of its own fire. (No one ever does, though our names
are said to be writ down before
we come to be.) He came out a sticky grub, flailing
the load of his own limbs
and was bound in cloth, his cheek brushed
with fingertip touch
so his lolling head lurched, and the sloppy mouth
found that first fullness—her milk
spilled along his throat, while his pure being
flooded her. (Each
feeds the other.) Then he was left
in the grain bin. Some animal muzzle
against his swaddling perhaps breathed him warm
till sleep came pouring that first draught
of death, the one he’d wake from
(as we all do) screaming.
For Who Can Endure
by Luci Shaw
When an Angel
snapped the old thin threads of speech
with an untimely birth
announcement, slit
the seemly cloth of an even
more blessed event with the
shears of miracle,
invaded the privacy of a dream,
multiplied
to ravage the dark silk of the sky, the
innocent ears
with swords of sound: news in a new dimension demanded
qualification.
The righteous were as vulnerable as others.
they trembled for those strong
antecedent fear nots, whether goat-
herds, virgins, workers in wood or
holy barren priests.
In our nights our
complicated modern dreams rarely
flower into visions. No
contemporary Gabriel
dumbfounds our worship, or burning,
visits our bedrooms. No
sign-post satellite hauls us, earth-bound but
star-struck, half
around the world with hope.
Are our sensibilities
too blunt to be assaulted
with spatial power-plays and far-out
proclamations of peace? Sterile,
skeptics, yet we may be broken
to his slow silent birth
(new-torn, new-
born ourselves at his
beginning new in us).
His bigness may still burst
out self-containment
to tell us—without angels’ mouths—
fear not.
God knows we need to hear it, now
when he may shatter
with his most shocking coming
this proud cracked place
and more if, for longer waiting,
he does not.
