Christmas Lament

Reader Meghan Lin wrote to say, “I don’t comment much at all, but I’m a huge fan of your blog and its awesome community. I wrote this about the recent tragedy, because I process grief by writing poetry. And I just wanted to send it to you. That’s all.”

Attached was Meghan’s poem Christmas Lament. Having read it I wanted to share it.

Christmas Lament

To the baby Jesus:

You, who gave yourself in

soft flesh,

helpless and grateful

to live in that singularly

limited and tender and

fragile and

infinite prism we call

a human life,

to suffer our pains and

rejoice in our rejoicings,

to eat and drink and sleep

and grow weary,

to give of yourself freely

to the very end,

surrendering your living nerves and

brittle limbs to the caustic lash,

the breaking hammer,

the slow choke,

to finally expire

blessing your torturers

and then

to rise again,

banishing death and

offering hope –

To you, Blessed One,

I bring tribute,

my hands full of my

shattered wealth, nothing left but

tears and words and

questions my tongue can’t pronounce, and

a list

of twenty-eight names,

twenty of them the bubbling,

musical names of children,

babies like yourself,

tender and soft and broken and

infinite,

leaking through my fingers

like sand, lost.

I bring you

the absence of laughter

on the playground,

and the pencil stubs

and fractured crayons

abandoned on the floor.

I bring you the

phantom hugs and

slippery kisses

missing now from the days.

I bring you the

little bodies, who touched

and tasted and

squabbled and reached and

stumbled and now

lie still.

I bring you hopes

and dreams, severed from

their timeline, tied and

floating freely like a

bouquet of bright helium balloons.

I bring you the parents,

spirits riven,

itching to peel their skin off,

to be someone else,

something else,

anything else.

I bring you the inarticulate

keening of a people

heartbroken and confused,

which cannot rise even

from the dust

so weighted is it with grief

choking on its own sorrow.

There are no words to explain this.

There is no prayer to pray.

I have nothing of value to give and so

I bring this

worthless poem

barbed with anger, mangled,

parched, unyielding and

unlovely,

whispered for all who suffer and die

and are silenced too soon.

I come, a ragged and

impoverished mourner, and

I lay these shards at your feet.