A Christmas Universe
For Charlotte
This year you’ve grown too old for anagrams,
that devil’s name within a Santa hat.
You tell me that you have no need of things
or wishes that you’ll later learn to curse:
the Midas touch, the genii trickster’s lamp
are all behind you.
Oranges, or nuts that you can crack,
chocolate in a stocking by the fire
that you can race to eat before it melts,
that you can suck before the juice runs dry,
that you can squeeze to crack, to break the shell.
A tiny space, a place before the fire,
to have in any order you desire.
It’s all you ask.
We sit here, Boxing Day, pyjama clad,
honour silence, nurse a Christmas cold.
Inside our hamlet there’s a universe,
a tardis world that grows in cottage walls
where dreams are birthsongs dancing out a flame,
licking coal to life.
You sit squashed up with Tigger on a seat,
read ‘Lord of the Rings’ time and again.
And in his head your Tigger softly says,
‘At fifteen years my friend still loves to bounce.
She springs from tale to tale, from spring
to spring.’
I’m curled up in an armchair with this book
writing out a story for myself, feeling like the Pooh-bear
with no brain. Wondering how P-branes intersect to form black holes.
My thoughts are Christmas ribbons tied in knots, discarded labels
from the day before, hiding in a black bag by the door.
I tap, unwrap a chocolate from its box,
so we can suck each segment
and not speak.
We wonder why the gentle snowflake falls,
solves, dissolves its secrets on our tongues:
Put a mirror in the middle of the water in the walls,
the Christmas birth canal is much too thin a line to carry us.
Some nuts, it seems, are much too tough to crack
in the small time we are lent in holidays.
Julie Boden, Poet in Residence at THSH (2005- date and a former Birmingham Laureate has written many commissioned pieces for the page, stage, radio, live mixed arts events and for film – she can’t believe she’s written so many Christmas poems ! This poem is published in Cut on the Bias collection.
I took my son to see
I.
I took my son to see
the illuminations. I
showed him Latin uncials
black after a millennium.
He jabbed at the convolutions
of leafery, hoping
to pull an initial through
the page, the case, the glass,
the initial he wanted
his hand to dishevel:
this initial
I.
*Claire Crowther's poems have been published widely and she has two collections out from Shearsman plus two recent pamphlets, Mollicle (Nine Arches) and Incense (Flarestack).