Farewell to Christmas

The baubles and beads are back in their box in the basement. The live tree is moved back, unadorned, to its home on our lightwell deck. The windows are no longer framed with twinkling lights. The Holiday CD’s are tucked back in the shelves behind the secular CD’s. The Season has come and gone and that’s as it should be. When it’s over, it’s over and there’s a certain pleasure in life returning to its normal routine. 

 

Here is a poem I once wrote about it:

When Christmas Is Over

 

Piled in heaps on the curbs of street corners,

That which gave light to home and heart and hearth

Now lie cast out and abandoned—

The Christmas trees.

 

It is human dream and desire that gave them their glow.

When the presents have been opened

and the songs have been sung

and all the cookies eaten,

the sparkling world returns to its dull luster

and the once beautiful trees are 

shedding needles on the carpeted floor.

 

How often this happens.

Beholders bring beauty to things through

the eyes of longing.

 

But longing fades away.

The skates in the store window

That are holy in the child’s wide gaze.

Later lie abandoned 

In the back of the closet.

 

Men will drive cars off roads for a mere passing glimpse

Of a beautiful woman.

But once desire is sated, 

it is all mere textbook anatomy,

 

Apart from the push and pull of want and have, of dream and do,

The poet cultivates a more constant love,

finding beauty in abandoned Christmas trees,

skates in the back of the closet

and his wife getting dressed in the morning.

                     

                                    -       2008