Dodging the Snow 2021

 

A Schoolboy Sleeping on his Book Jean-Baptiste Greuze

I'm delighted once again to be included in Dodging the Rain's 12 poems of Christmas, aka Dodging the Snow. Thanks to editor Neil Slevin for including 5 poems, written late last year, all on a festive theme. The poems can be read here, while The Christmas Book is posted below too. 

The Christmas Book

Treasure Island, Black Beauty, Heidi,

Lorna Doone, Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn

all populated Christmases past

(I can hear Marley’s chains rattling).

Their names are reeling spools, 

a child’s cinema on a dark winter morning, 

a galloping horse, a raft on a wide river, 

a high mountain top.

Under a duvet sky I ran by the moon 

of the torch with The Famous Five across moors.

I watched Anne’s dreams unfurl on Prince Edward Island,

realise her courage in those journeys to family and love.

You could never be lonely with a window 

to a wider world, another’s passion processed,

a transfer of energy, a most sincere communication,

a leaving for foreign places, and always a coming home.

Books are the real fairy tales.

Orla Fay

Happy Christmas 2021

 

Happy Christmas to the readers of the post. I've written this poem in the last couple of hours while pondering The Three Wise Men and some images I collected today on a walk. I couldn't help hearing T.S. Eliots's Prufrock telling me earlier,

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Last week I saw a shooting star, and hence the title of the poem. 

A Falling Star

Two millennia ago, it was a Middle Eastern town

that they visited with gold, frankincense, and myrrh,

not an Irish village dappled with rain and more blurry rain.

None of the white stuff this year, except in a snow globe,

a shaken, shook thing, a genie’s lamp, a spirit conduit,

transport to the past, a future, dreamland. 

Before the fall of night, (that great, black citadel)

the curtain draws shut, hush of Christmas Eve 

descending while light rises colourful, myriad, 

blue bulbs swaying on a penned tree, window sparkle,

twinkling phials and canisters carried on camels

across sand, hourglass, windswept dunes by Magi.

What of them, these shadowy, bronze-skinned men?

Balthasar, Melchior, and Caspar, in transit from Parthia,

astrologers chasing the sun, Star of Bethlehem, 

lost in their alchemy, Jerusalem bound, where they asked,

Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? 

For we have seen His star in the east and have come to worship Him.*

Where would they go now, following primitive instruments?

Wise still to believe in dreams, to be guided by the heart

and faith? Would they be led to a place of the faithless

to think that among the very mortal, the fallen meteors,

grace and humility could be born? When they arrive at the river

that carries the sorrow of the people,

will they recognise the child of the city?

Orla Fay

*Matthew 2:1-2