Sunday, December 3, 2023

Ruth Daniell : Two December poems

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.