I attended my son's school Christmas program. I got to read poetry to a group of people who actually wanted to hear poetry. That doesn't happen very often, unless your name is Maya Angelou or Sharon Olds.
Tonight's poem is a couple years old. I wrote it in 2013. It was the last Christmas poem that my sister who passed away helped me with. She always found the images and put them together with the poem. When she got really ill, I took over the job. I miss her creativity. She really had an great eye for creating something beautiful.
If you can't tell, I still miss her a great deal.
Age of Miracles
by: Martin Achatz
My
daughter has reached that age
when
her body unfurls
gospels
of growth all night,
psalms
filled with arm, leg, hair, sweat,
breath
staled by the tilt
from
girl to woman. She will soon
inherit
gifts. Blood. Ovum.
Creation.
Then
she will be lost to me. Gone
on a
long journey across desert, mountain,
to a
distant Bethlehem.
This
December, she tells my wife
she
doesn’t believe in caribou
flying
over glacier, tundra. Questions
things
like seraphim choirs,
kingdoms
at the North Pole,
donkeys
that sing “Dona nobis pacem”
on the
winter solstice. I know,
she
says, nods as if she’s accomplice
to
some divine conspiracy theory.
So I
write her this poem
about
last Friday, when twenty inches
of
snow fell in Cairo, Alexandria,
Jerusalem. Brought the entire Middle East
a
silence it hadn’t heard in 112 years.
Children
in refugee camps danced
in the
blizzard, made rosefinches
with
ice bodies, palm frond wings.
No
bombs. No bullets. Just white.
Everywhere. White upon white.
From
the Mediterranean to the Mount of Olives.
It’s a
miracle, little girl,
like
the smell of baked ham and cloves
on
Christmas Eve, or the sound
of
your first breath
the
morning you were born.
Please vote for Saint Marty:
Poet Laureate of the U. P. voting
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