If I’d been Santa Claus
If I’d been Santa Claus
I wouldn’t have lived in a semi
in a place in North Yorkshire;
I’d have set sail from
my fur-lined igloo once a year
over the whole sleeping world.
I’d have grown a wonderful beard,
slopped about in an old red dressing gown,
roaring my head off and left
a map of wet footprints.
My best friends would have been
Thunder and Lightning and Blizzard.
I wouldn’t have met my kids
but spent the whole year alone
in my glittering ice-house imagining
the thing they most wanted
and leaving it for them
to find when they woke up.
I‘d have met only the stars,
the moon and the velvet dark,
the owls, the bats, a curious fox
and the children of strangers
for one startled moment
before sleep claimed them.
If I’d been Santa Claus
there’d have been no
swanky play-stations,
no naff Disney spin-offs,
no carrots, no coal, no disappointment,
no wrinkled apple in the toe of a sock.
Carole Bromley’s first full-length collection, A Guided Tour of the Ice House, was published by Smith/Doorstop in 2011. She teaches Creative Writing for York University and writes a poetry blog at http://www.yorkmix.com
(If I’d been Santa Claus was first published in A Guided Tour of the Ice House, Smith/Doorstop, 2011)