CHRISTMAS POEMS 2024

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My Father Played the Melodeon

 My father played the melodeon

Outside at our gate,

There were stars in the morning east

And they danced to his music.


Across the world bogs his melodeon called

To Lennons and Callens

As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry

I knew some strange thing had happened.


Outside in the cow-house my mother

Made the music of milking,

The light of the stable-lamp was a star

And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.


A water-hen screeched in the bog,

Mass-going feet

Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes -

Somebody wistfully twisted a bellow's wheel.


My child-poet picked out the letters

On Time's black stone,

In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland

The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.


Cassiopeia was over

Cassidy's hanging hill.

I looked and three whin bushes rode across

The horizon - the Three Wise Kings.


My father played the melodeon,

My mother milked the cows

And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned

On the Virgin Mary's blouse.

Patrick Kavanagh

                                     

 Chosen by Damien


I Happened to Be Standing 

I don’t know where prayers go,

or what they do.

Do cats pray, while they sleep

half-asleep in the sun?

Does the opossum pray as it

crosses the street?

The sunflowers? The old black oak

growing older every year?

I know I can walk through the world,

along the shore or under the trees,

with my mind filled with things

of little importance, in full

self-attendance. A condition I can’t really

call being alive.

Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,

or does it matter?

The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.

Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing

just outside my door, with my notebook open,

which is the way I begin every morning.

Then a wren in the privet began to sing.

He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,

I don’t know why. And yet, why not.

I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe

or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.

But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be

if it isn’t a prayer?

So I just listened, my pen in the air.

Mary Oliver

Chosen by Barbara


YOUTH AND  AGE

 Much did I rage when young,
Being by the world oppressed,
 But now with flattering tongue
 It speeds the parting guest

W.B.Yeats

Chosen by Rosemary



THE STERLING SILVER MIRROR
No matter how the wind and the stars carried the news
The slaves knew
Sherman was coming
All they had to do was wait:
As they sang the Spiritual “Why can’t I Wait on the Lord?”
They had the patience to know He may not come
When you call Him
But He always comes on time

My great great grandmother was a slave holding inside
Her the first of our family to be born
Free
Sherman came burning the hate
And greed freeing my ancestors
My great great grandmother who had never seen her own face
Carried her free baby and a sterling silver hand mirror away

Cornelia whom we called MamaDear was the first

To be born free

MamaDear married Watson and birthed

Three sons and a daughter
MamaDear gave her youngest son the sterling silver mirror
When he graduated from Fisk University

We forget the enslaved had no way of knowing
What they looked like except through the eyes of those who loved them
The men had no shoes to wear other than their feet became leather
Both were precious
Grandpapa had shoes and the mirror

Some in the family say
The mirror was stolen
But how can you steal when you were

When I left my parents’ home I was the youngest daughter I took only
Two things:
A diamond pendant Sister Althea gave me for eighth grade graduation
And The Sterling Silver Hand Mirror
I am 81 years old: I have both still

Nikki Giovanni

Chosen by Elizabeth
To celebrate Nikki Giovanni's life 
(She died on December 9th)










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