Request: Christmas/winter holiday poems

[pyreneeees.livejournal.com]

Hello everyone! A friend just asked me for a poem that she could handwrite and put in a frame for Christmas, and I was personally horrified to realize I don't know any contemporary Christmas or winter poems. Gah! Please inundate me with all your favorite winter/Christmas/holiday poems, and I shall give you this lovely, hopeful Anne Sexton poem in return. Happy start of winter!

Snow
by Anne Sexton

Snow, blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
Trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it.
Someone once said:
Don't bite till you know
if it's bread or stone.
What I bite is all bread,
rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.

Comments

[ghostsandlovers.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh, how bizarre. I started thinking after I'd read your request, but before I'd read your poem, of a poem I had once read about snow that contained the phrase "there is hope". I was wracking my brains for a few moments, trying to remember which it was, then my eyes travelled down and I realised you had posted that very same poem.

Here's another I like; not really Christmassy but it always makes me feel wintery. It may be a little long to be put in a frame, but I suppose excerpts could be used:

Preludes
TS Eliot

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.


II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.


III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.


IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.