How did it get to be the week before Christmas? This year, I feel like every holiday (not to mention birthdays) snuck up behind me in stocking feet and yelled, “BOO!” There wasn’t time to prepare, decorate, buy things…only time to be startled and jump.
Below is a poem I wrote last year during Christmas and included in my third book, Shadow and Memory. Keeping with the theme of startling holidays, this poem is a Christmas meditation whose ending startled me when I wrote it. Perhaps it will surprise readers as well.
Yule-icide
If the evolved monkeys can ever explain
how sacred fire descends from the stars
into Christmas tree lights
in a hushed room,
or how feathery branches
interlace in prayerful shadows
along the walls,
I’ll shatter my skull’s silent night
with a bullet whose path
screams through a brain
that knows everything.
A Wandering Minstrel 