poems for Christmas

Poem of the Week, by Joseph Enzweiler

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Come Write Together with us for an hour each morning, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. Click here for more information and to sign up. 

I’m sitting here in pre-dawn darkness looking at our Christmas tree. The ornaments on it span more than a century: fragile faded globes that belonged to my grandmother, a barely-hanging-together paper chain made by an elementary-school daughter, a 2025 wooden star someone left in the Poetry Hut yesterday, a flame-colored kayak my Christmas-loving mother bought me two summers ago in Old Forge, NY.

And a bunch of ancient, weird ornaments that at a painful time when I had to leave behind most of the ornaments I cherished and had gathered over many years, I bought ar Value Village. Tattered boxes of discards left over from someone’s estate sale.

But guess what, it’s possible to grow to love and appreciate strange old ornaments that must have meant something precious to people you’ll never know. Many things are possible in life. I keep reminding myself of that.  

Christmas 1963, by Joseph Enzweiler

Because we wanted much that year
and had little. Because the winter phone
for days stayed silent that would call
our father back to work, and he
kept silent too with our mother,
fearfully proud before us.

Because I was young that morning
in gray light untouched on the rug
and our gifts were so few, propped
along the furniture, for a second
my heart fell, then saw how large
they made the spaces between them

to take the place of less. Because
the curtained sun rose brightly
on our discarded paper and the things
themselves, these forty years,
have grown too small to see, the emptiness
measured out remains the gift,

fills the whole room now, that whole year
out across the snowy lawn. Because
a drop of shame burned quietly
in the province of love. Because
we had little that year
and were given much.

Click here for more information about Joseph Enzweiler. Today’s poem first appeared in 2004 in  The Man Who Ordered Perch, published by Iris Press. 

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Poem of the Week, by Tom Hennen

Posted on by alisonmcghee

After a lifetime of winter (the Adirondack mountains, Vermont, Minnesota) I can do without -40 windchills, insta-frozen nose hairs, ice and the mummification required to step onto the front steps with shovel in hand, but I could never do without the change of seasons. Spring, summer, fall, winter: I don’t know how life is experienced by people who live in places where nothing much changes, weatherwise. I only know what it feels like to wake up and step outside and smell the air and look at the sky and listen to ice melting or birds singing or wind in the leaves, to see that first maple leaf flutter red to the ground in the fall or that first pussy willow budding in the spring, and how it hurts my heart. Not hurts, exactly, but that’s part of it. Stretches my heart. Fills my heart. Reminds me that time is turning, for all of us —In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were full of light gathered on summer pastures–and how nothing ever really goes away. Every summer is held deep in the heart of every winter.

 

Sheep in the Winter Night, by Tom Hennen

Inside the barn the sheep were standing, pushed close to one
another. Some were dozing, some had eyes wide open listening
in the dark. Some had no doubt heard of wolves. They looked
weary with all the burdens they had to carry, like being thought
of as stupid and cowardly, disliked by cowboys for the way they
eat grass about an inch into the dirt, the silly look they have
just after shearing, of being one of the symbols of the Christian
religion. In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were
full of light gathered on summer pastures. Above them their
white breath was suspended, while far off in the pine woods,
night was deep in silence. The owl and rabbit were wondering,
along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes,
but the power that moves through the world and makes our
hair stand on end was keeping the answer to itself.

 

For more information on Tom Hennen, please click here.