Celebrating Christmas
Snow falls
onto the fields and trees and lawns
and
multi-coloured lights line the edges of houses.
It all
feels familiar and comfortable to you.
You believe
you’re doing okay now,
though
sometimes you still catch yourself crying
suddenly in
quiet moments or catching your sweetheart’s eyes
and seeing
something of what he sees in yours.
Christmas
songs are about the birth of an infant.
You listen.
The joy that a child brings
seems at
once something nearer and farther than ever
from your
understanding. You hold your body
like it was
a dream but you remember your changed
breasts,
you remember the nausea, you remember
praying,
Lord, I can do this. Now you listen. You look
out into
the night and you listen. The old songs are
saying that
the world is saved.
The Massacre of the Innocents
Peter
Paul Rubeuns, c 1610, oil on panel
I spend
more time reading the gallery’s description of the painting
than I do
upon the painting itself: I am too weak for it.
The babies wrenched
from their mothers’ arms,
dashed to
the ground, their bodies already turning blue
in death.
To console myself, I walk through the rooms again,
to the
black-and-white lithographs. There, I see the adoration
of the
shepherds, and the Christ child haloed in his manger.
I recognize
the indulgent smiles of the strangers as those
of the
people I meet on the subway, on the streetcar,
on the bus,
in grocery store line ups. Oh, I don’t mean
to be
sacrilegious: but isn’t it obvious that every baby
should be met
with joy? You can know nothing about a baby
and still
know you love them. I adjust my son’s knitted hat
over his
soft head and walk with him in his carrier into the night
to a party I’m too tired
for, and where everyone who sees him
will
remark, as everyone always does, on what a good baby
I have,
what a good baby I have.
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Ruth Daniell is a teacher, editor, writer, and the author of The Brightest Thing (Caitlin Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Press, 2020), Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #Metoo (University of Regina Press, 2021) and Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees (Caitlin Press, 2022). She lives with her husband and children in Kelowna, BC, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the syilx/Okanagan people.
