This is my sixth (kind of) annual Christmas Poem post. I never got around to writing one in 2018. You can read the others here:
And on a related note, my Christmas Carol post.
Other posts on Christmas:
The Christmas Wars, Or, How To Use Christmas As An Excuse To Be A Jerk
Night Shift At The Hospital on Christmas Eve
The Haunted Man by Charles Dickens
Reading A Christmas Carol With My Kids
***
In part, this series has been my way of wrestling with the trauma of the past several years, which have brought the loss of our longtime church, loss of connection to my former faith tradition, estrangement from my parents (over religion and politics as well as the way those toxic ideologies have impacted my own family), and of course, the swerve of my country toward fascism and theofascism, driven by those of my former religious tradition. Christianity in the sense of following Christ has been replaced by Republicanity and, honestly, Ku Klux Klanity.
Since Christmas has long been a favorite holiday for me, this has been rough. I miss the days when I could celebrate wholeheartedly, and feel connection to others through that celebration. As a kid, family gatherings were something I looked forward to, so it was devastating that after I grew up, they became increasingly a battleground of family politics and the culture wars - and a chance for certain family members to bully my wife yet again - so we stopped going a number of years ago. I still enjoy what we have with the kids and with my brother and family, but there is always a certain bittersweet element to it, because of the losses that have come.
Fortunately, I am not the only one with this experience, whether among my friends, or the poets of the past. There are a plethora of expressions that have spoken to me over the years, and they have tended to hold up pretty well. (See my carol post above, for what the prophets of the 19th Century had to say about slavery, for example.) So, as I have most years, I kept my eyes open for good Christmas season poems, and chose four to feature. (Don’t worry about the ones that didn’t make the cut - those are carefully noted for future years.)
The first poem I chose is by a poet that I discovered just this year, Lucille Clifton. She had a long career as a poet and educator, but for some reason, she never attained the fame of her contemporary, Maya Angelou. (See past installments for an Angelou poem.) I mean no shade to Angelou, but she wasn’t the only great poet of the last 50 years, and not even the only great African American female poet of her generation. Clifton certainly deserves a mention in that conversation, and she may be - in my opinion at least - in the 20th Century pantheon.
I recently read her collection, Two-Headed Woman, and discovered a cycle of poems all about the Nativity and the Incarnation. To say that Clifton put a different spin on a familiar story is to undersell how she subverts our “traditional” interpretations of the story. I could have selected any number of the poems (and you can read another in my post on the collection, linked above), but I decided to go with this one.
a song of mary
(by Lucille Clifton)
somewhere it being yesterday.
i a maiden in my mother’s house.
the animals silent outside.
is morning.
princes sitting on thrones in the east
studying the incomprehensible heavens.
joseph carving a table somewhere
in another place.
i watching my mother.
i smiling an ordinary smile.
Many, although not all, of Clifton’s poems use all lowercase. Unlike e e cummings, she does use punctuation. In this poem, Clifton makes a greater circle of the female in the idea of the Nativity. It isn’t just Mary, and an angel, and then men. Rather, Mary is seen as a continuation of her own mother, and indeed the string of mothers. The start of the Nativity is in that continuity of motherhood, of the feminine divine. I strongly recommend reading the entire sequence, and, as Mary did, ponder these things in your heart.
The next one is an oldie but goodie, by the amazing John Donne. His “Holy Sonnet” series is amazingly deep and rewarding to read and re-read. (Most famous is “Death Be Not Proud,” which most of us read and analyzed in high school, but it is by no means the only worthy one.)
Holy Sonnet 15
John Donne
Wilt thou love God as he thee? Then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make His temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blest,
And still begetting—for he ne’er begun—
Hath deign’d to choose thee by adoption,
Co-heir to His glory, and Sabbath’s endless rest.
And as a robb’d man, which by search doth find
His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,
The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.
‘Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
That last couplet is the crux of the poem, on which the rest turns. I am no expert on comparative religion, but I am not unread on the subject. While religions in general tend to share far more in common than not, there is one thing that really stands out to me (and other writers on the subject) that seems to be a distinctly Christian idea. The Incarnation, God in the Flesh, isn’t unique as an idea - gods take human form ALL THE TIME. But they tend to appear human, rather than be human. The incarnation of Christ in the person of Jesus wasn’t just a god in a man-suit, but an instance where the divine took on ALL the limitations of humanity. And that includes the limitations of knowing only what he was taught or could learn, all the limitations of a truly human mind. (It is literally heresy to believe otherwise, yet I think in practice most Evangelicals believe that Jesus retained his omniscience - he retained the mind of god. This has led to some problematic beliefs about, well, a lot of things. That could be an entire post.)
I will also note here that Donne, like many (perhaps most?) Christian thinkers of the past, believed in Christus Victor, not Penal Substitutionary Atonement. I don’t always agree with Donne’s theology on every point, but the man was an amazing thinker, and his longing for connection to the divine never fails to inspire.
The next poem is a significant switch in mood and theme. I try to include a more secular poem in this series, both because not everyone shares my religion, but also because “Christmas” is - like literally every human holiday - syncretistic. That’s not a bad thing. It just means that we are creatures of culture, and combine the past and the new constantly, reinterpreting our experiences in light of everything else. Thus, many “pagan” traditions have become part - indeed core rituals and symbols - of Christmas. Unlike the Fundamentalist subculture I grew up in, I have no problem with this. Humans have found their own connections with the natural world, its cycles, and its spirituality in various ways over time. That we choose to mark the winter solstice with our own story of rebirth and renewal is just another metaphorical way of connecting with deeper meaning.
That said, here is one by Elizabeth Bishop. It is both a poem and a riddle. Have fun figuring it out.
The Colder the Air
by Elizabeth Bishop
We must admire her perfect aim,
this huntress of the winter air
whose level weapon needs no sight,
if it were not that everywhere
her game is sure, her shot is right.
The least of us could do the same.
The chalky birds or boats stand still,
reducing her conditions of chance;
air’s gallery marks identically
the narrow gallery of her glance.
The target-center in her eye
is equally her aim and will.
Time’s in her pocket, ticking loud
on one stalled second. She’ll consult
not time nor circumstance. She calls
on atmosphere for her result.
(It is this clock that later falls
in wheels and chimes of leaf and cloud.)
Gollum would approve. I find the rhyme scheme (abcbca) to be fascinating. A bit different than what one might expect, but it ties the stanzas together internally in a way that fits with the thematic ties between the first and last lines each time.
The final poem is from Madeleine L’Engle, whose poetry seems to be fairly unknown. She wrote a lot about love and hope and standing for what is good and loving especially in times of darkness and hate. Which is, well, as much on point now as it was during World War Two. For the same reasons. There are those who continue to feed fear and lust for power and greed, and license to harm the vulnerable.
Into The Darkest Hour
by Madeleine L’Engle
It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss-
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.
It was time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight-
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.
And in a time like this
how celebrate his birth
when all things fall apart?
Ah! Wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.
This is another example of a six-line stanza, but with the abcabc rhyme scheme instead. The ampersands are in the original, which is definitely an unusual device in poetry.
L’Engle’s words retain their power over time, and I find them inspiring. The hope of the Kingdom lives in our hearts, perhaps most when it seems most far away on earth.
Whatever you believe, whatever your connection to the transcendent, may the true spirit of goodness be with you this season.
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