A Christmas Song

                        Christmas is coming. The goose is getting fat
                        Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.
                        If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do.
                        If you haven’t got a ha’penny, God bless you.

Tonight the wide, wet flakes of snow

Drift down like Christmas suicides,

Layering the eaves and boughs until

The landscape seems transformed, as from

A night of talk or love. I’ve come

From cankered ports and railroad hubs

To winter in a northern state:

Three months of wind and little light.

Wood split, flue cleaned, and ashes hauled,

I am now proof against the cold

And make a place before the stove.

Mired fast in middle age, possessed

Of staved-in barn and brambled lot,

I think of that fierce-minded woman

Whom I loved, painting in a small,

Unheated room, or of a friend,

Sharp-ribbed from poverty, who framed

And fitted out his house by hand

And writes each night by kerosene.

I think, that is, of others who

Withdrew from commerce and the world

To work for joy instead of gain.

O would that I could gather them

This Yuletide, and shower them with coins.

Copyright Credit: “A Christmas Song” from One Unblinking Eye by Norman Williams. Published in 2003 by Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, Athens Ohio (www.ohioswallow.com).

Source: One Blinking Eye (Ohio University Press, 2003)