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.

 

Ruth Daniell : Moon Rise

 

 

(Supermoon July 13, 2022)

 

Last week we woke up the kids just before midnight to go and see the moon
and it was magical, the way their own little moon-faces lit up too,

how huge and familiar the moon is, how when it was time to walk back
to bed our son, three years old, calmly told the moon goodnight.

When it’s daylight and he sees the moon in blue sky he points and laughs at it,
Silly moon, go to sleep, moon, because he is learning how the world works

and, even, some of the things outside of the world: the moon, the sun,
the stars. Today his sister asked me what galaxy means

and I tried to explain and, later, she asked Why was there darkness?
What darkness? I asked. First there was darkness, she told me.

I was reading a story about God. She’s four. We don’t really talk about God
in our house but we do talk a lot about stories, and about darkness,

how there is a time for darkness and a time for light. Yesterday you
successfully convinced our son to go back to sleep for awhile

when he woke up at dawn but his little body is ready for the day
as soon as that gold seeps through the not-quite-impenetrable

black-out curtains we installed in the kids’ room, hopeful
for our own sleep. I never saw so many sunrises until I was his

mother. And, too, I never thought much about moonrises until
last week when even close to midnight I couldn’t find the moon.

I scouted out the back garden, the front lawn, the neighbours’,
and it was a block and a half away before I was far enough

from houses and trees to see the immense thing, the supermoon,
so low in the sky I almost missed it though I knew it was there.

It’s been over two years of a pandemic and we want to find
wonderful, big things to be excited about for our children.

The news is full of fire and bullet holes and heartbreak.
Low in my body but not to be missed is the new baby growing,

a crescent of limbs kicking me. I walked alone with my belly
until I found the moon and I texted you, Found it,

and you chuckled. It’s ridiculous it took so long. I was grinning
too, walking back with purpose: now we knew where the moon was

we could justify waking the children up to see it, we would show them
this one wonderful ridiculous thing. First there is darkness

but then there is a light. Sometimes you can’t see it
even when it should be obvious it is there, and massive,

but it’s still there. If you can’t see it someone else can.
And if you have the time it’s still probably a good idea

to keep looking for yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

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 family in Kelowna, BC, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the syilx/Okanagan people, where she is at work on her second collection of poetry.