December 23, 2025: “The Protestor,” Illness, “Winter Solstice Haiku”

Merry Christmas Eve eve!

Yes, it is the day before the day before.  It was my intention, once my vacation started, to blog every night.  However, my son decided to bring a particularly nasty bug home from school last Friday, so my entire household has been battling fevers, coughs, runny noses, and exhaustion.  Today is the first day I have felt almost human since Saturday morning.

It was also my intention to do all kinds of Christmas prep over the weekend.  Wrapping presents.  Baking cookies.  Working on my Christmas poem.  Filling out our Christmas cards.  That all went out the window, too.  I am now on my fourth day of illness, and all I have to show for it is a pecan pie and a stack of Christmas cards that went into the mail yesterday. 

Since I’ve had a lot of time to just lay on my couch, I’ve been reflecting a lot on ghosts of Christmas.  People who are no longer a part of my life, by death or design.  I think this time of year lends itself to this kind of nostalgia.  The Christmases of today simply can’t hold a candle to the Christmases of our childhoods, when Dad and Mom and Grandmas and Grandpas made sure we got everything we wanted from Santa.

Sharon Olds gets nostalgic about a person she once knew . . . 

The Protestor

by: Sharon Olds

     (for Bob Stein)

We were driving north, through the snow, you said

you had turned twenty-one during Vietnam, you were

1-A.  The road curved

and curved back, the branches laden,

you said you had decided not to go

to Canada.  Which meant you’d decided to

go to jail, a slender guy of

twenty-one, which meant you’d decided to be

raped rather than to kill, if it was their 

life or your ass, it was your ass.

We drove in silence, such soft snow

so heavy borne-down.  That was when I’d come to

know I loved the land of my birth—

when the men had to leave, they could never come back,

I looked and loved every American

needle on every American tree, I thought

my soul was in it.  But if I were taken and

used, taken and used, I think

my soul would die, I think I’d be easily broken,

the work of my life over.  And you’d said,

This is the word of my life, to say,

with my body itself, You fuckers you cannot

tell me who to kill.  As if there were a

spirit free of the body, safe from it.

After a while, you talked about your family,

not starting as I had, with

husbands and kids, leavening everyone else out—

you started with your grandparents 

and worked your way back, away from yourself,

deeper and deeper into Europe, into

the Middle East, the holy book

buried sometimes in the garden, sometimes

swallowed and carried in the ark of the body itself.

Yes, people shuttle in and out of our lives all the time.  My life has been blessed with loving parents and siblings.  Friends who care deeply, feel deeply.  Over the last few days, as I’ve slept and hallucinated with cold medicine and ibuprofen, I have thought quite a bit about my mother, in particular.  This Christmas season, I will be playing or singing at six church services in the next five days.  My mother is the reason I’m a church organist.  She’s the one who made me take piano lessons for twelve years straight, and she’s also the one who volunteered my keyboard talents to our parish priest over 40 years ago.  The rest, as they say, is history.

So, my mom is haunting me this Christmas, as are all the memories of Christmases past.  Nothing can ever stay the same, except in a photograph or video.  Even poems don’t stay the same.  A poem that I read five years ago (maybe about a mother’s death) has a completely different meaning for me tonight.  I had wonderful Christmases as a kid.  A living room floor literally overtaken with presents.  Tupperware upon Tupperware filled with cookies.  Baked ham and rolls.  I was really lucky.

Those days are long gone now, and I have to accept that.  My business is now making those same kind of treasured memories for my kids.  I want my daughter and son to look back with joy and longing at Christmases with my wife and I.  I think we’re accomplishing that.  Earlier this evening, my daughter phoned me from the road (she’s on her way home with her significant other).  We talked for over 40 minutes, and it was all about all our family traditions, from pumpkin puff pancakes to watching Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.  

So, I am on the mend, although, when I’m done typing this post, I’m going to go lie on the couch and stay there, probably for the rest of the night.  Tomorrow, it’s gift wrapping, house cleaning, ham baking, and music practicing.  (By the way, I got up this morning at 5:30 a.m. to work on my Christmas poem.  Three hours later, it was drafted and done.). Tomorrow night?  Two church services.  

Tonight, however, I’m just happy that I’m feeling slightly better, and I’m looking forward to some good family time over the next few days.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for the Winter Solstice.  He was just too damn sick to post it.  It’s based (very loosely) on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

In celebration of the winter solstice, write a poem that begins 96% of the universe is made up of the dark and unknown . . .  Your poem might posit what is the other 4% made of or perhaps share (with specific images) why you enjoy (or don’t enjoy) winter.

Winter Solstice Haiku

by: Martin Achatz

snow and wind all day

rabbit tracks in the backyard

winter syllables

moon trapped in branches

pine needles stitch the heavens

embroidered solstice

coughing at midnight

my eyes water with fever

my body blizzards

angel tree topper

face coffee brown like Jesus

ICE storm tomorrow

September 5: "Poetry," Illness, Reality Check

It has been a day of illness for me.  At first, I thought I was suffering from allergies--runny nose, cough, blocked ears.  As the day and my symptoms progressed (fever, aches, more mucous than Slimer from Ghostbusters), I surrounded myself with an Appalachian range of used Kleenexes and tissues.  My eyes are gushing, and my throat stings.

Before you ask, I did test for COVID.  Twice.  Both tests came back negative.  So, I can't even claim that distinction.  Basically, I just have a very nasty cold.  Annoyingly ordinary.  Nothing to write home or a poem about.  

Billy Collins tries to define poetry . . . 

Poetry

by: Billy Collins

Call it a field where the animals

who were forgotten by the Ark

come to graze under the evening clouds.

Or a cistern where the rain that fell

before history trickles over a concrete lip.

However you see it,

this is no place to set up

the three-legged easel of realism

or make a reader climb

over the many fences of a plot.

Let the portly novelist

with his noisy typewriter

describe the city where Francine was born,

how Albert read the paper on the train,

how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.

Let the playwright with her torn cardigan

and a dog curled on the rug

move the characters

from the wings to the stage

to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.

Poetry is no place for that.

We have enough to do

complaining about the price of tobacco,

passing the dripping ladle,

and singing songs to a bird in a cage.

We are busy doing nothing--

and all we need for that is an afternoon,

a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,

or better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

I couldn't even be a poet tonight, even though Collins says that poets are "busy doing nothing."  I didn't even have the energy to do nothing.  I was supposed to lead an online poetry workshop this evening.  After debating with myself for close to an hour, I came to the conclusion that I would have looked like extra from The Walking Dead if I got on Zoom and tried to write with anyone.  

So I simply grabbed a pillow and blanket and fell asleep on the couch.  Every once in a while, I would climb to the surface of consciousness long enough to take a drink of water or blow my nose.

Eventually, I woke up and decided to type this post.  Now that I'm done, I'm ready to collapse.  Literally.  I think these last few weeks of little sleep and lots of work have caught up with me.  My body is giving me a reality check.  

Here's the reality:  Saint Marty is exhausted.