Wallace Stevens: A Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings
Doug Anderson: Morning Prayer
I am an eternal innocent: I believe in love,
I believe in the ability of human beings
to transcend their repetitive ignorance.
Alice Friman: The Road Not Taken
I stood at the window
leaning my head, there
where the glass was cool
and looked out at the trees
bare now in January
Jim Daniels: Ghost Guns
Plush Jesus dolls scattered
on the picked-over discount table
at the dollar store
Sandy Solomon: While You’re Away
Were it a question not of days but weeks
I’d learn, I’m sure, to sprawl mid-bed, the way,
before we met, I did.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Psalm for Sunrise
Let the horses of dreaming ramble
home slowly from their sweet dark pastures.
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Chana Bloch: The New World
That’s the old country for you:
they ate with their hands, went hungry to bed,
slept in their stink. When pain knocked,
they opened the door.
Charles Reznikoff: The lamps are burning in the synagogue
Let us begin then humbly. Not by asking:
Who is This you pray to? Name Him;
define Him. For the answer is:
we do not name Him.
Once out of a savage fear, perhaps;
now out of knowledge—of our ignorance.
Joseph Bathanti: High Mass
Winter Sundays,
when my father was on strike from steel,
he and my mother woke late,
then rose and prepared for high mass at Saints Peter and Paul.
Linda Parsons: Two Poems for Christmas
the light hasn’t always been easy to find—
haloed fires of childhood, my walk
on coals to the marriage pyre, parents
passed to flame and ash. All have sparked
the change ahead, all have lit the way.
Video: Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer
Grandma got run over by a reindeer
Walking home from our house Christmas Eve.
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa,
But as for me and Grandpa, we believe.
William Butler Yeats: The Magi
Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
Barbara Hamby: Ode to the ‘Messiah’, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London
at the composer’s parish church, my husband says
he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair
