Christmas poems
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The House of Time
© Stephen Edgar
And fleetingly it seemed to him
That in between one eye blink and the next
Christmas Away from Home
© Jane Kenyon
Her sickness brought me to Connecticut.
Mornings I walk the dog: that part of life
is intact. Who's painted, who's insulated
or put siding on, who's burned the lawn
with lime—that's the news on Ardmore Street.
Weltende Variation #I
© Bill Knott
(homage Jacob van Hoddis)
The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards
A blade snaps in two during an autopsy
The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms
Many protest the public stoning of a guitar pick
Flower-De-Luce: Christmas Bells
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
My Sister's Sleep
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
She fell asleep on Christmas Eve:
At length the long-ungranted shade
Of weary eyelids overweigh'd
The pain nought else might yet relieve.
St Vincent’s
© William Stanley Merwin
eyes open and ears to hear
these years across from St Vincent’s Hospital
above whose roof those clouds rose
If It Were Not for You
© Hayden Carruth
The night winds reach
like the blind breath of the world
in a rhythm without mind, gusting and beating
as if to destroy us, battering our poverty
and all the land’s flat and cold and dark
under iron snow
The Jungfrau To Beth
© Louisa May Alcott
God bless you, dear Queen Bess!
May nothing you dismay,
But health and peace and happiness
Be yours, this Christmas day.
Giant Night
© Anne Waldman
Awake in a giant night
is where I am
There is a river where my soul,
hungry as a horse drinks beside me
Christmas,1870
© Alfred Austin
Heaven strews the earth with snow,
That neither friend nor foe
May break the sleep of the fast-dying year;
A world arrayed in white,
Late dawns, and shrouded light,
Attest to us once more that Christmas-tide is here.
On Christmas Eve
© William Wilfred Campbell
In byre and barn the mows are brim with sheaves,
Where stealeth in with phosphorescent tread
The glimmering moon, and, neath his wattled eaves,
The kennelled hound unto the darkness grieves
His chilly straw, and from his gloom-lit shed,
The wakeful cock proclaims the midnight dread.
In the Basement of the Goodwill Store
© Ted Kooser
In musty light, in the thin brown air
of damp carpet, doll heads and rust,
The Cottager
© John Clare
True as the church clock hand the hour pursues
He plods about his toils and reads the news,
Christmas Tree
© Daniel Nester
This seablue fir that rode the mountain storm
Is swaddled here in splints of tin to die.
Sofas around in chubby velvet swarm;
Onlooking cabinets glitter with flat eye;
Here lacquer in the branches runs like rain
And resin of treasure starts from every vein.
Christmas Day, 1850
© George MacDonald
Beautiful stories wed with lovely days
Like words and music:-what shall be the tale
Of love and nobleness that might avail
To express in action what this sweetness says-
My mother’s body
© Marge Piercy
The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:
The Boy and the Mantle
© Thomas Percy
In the third day of May,
To Carleile did come
A kind curteous child,
That cold much of wisdome.
