Christmas poems
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More Sonnets At Christmas
© Allen Tate
Suppose I take an arrogant bomber, stroke
By stroke, up to the frazzled sun to hear
Sun-ghostlings whisper: Yes, the capital yoke—
Remove it and there’s not a ghost to fear
This crucial day, whose decapitate joke
Languidly winds into the inner ear.
from Omeros
© Derek Walcott
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze
Childhood Ideogram
© Larry Levis
I lay my head sideways on the desk,
My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones,
The Burning Babe
© Robert Southwell
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
The Life of Lincoln West
© Gwendolyn Brooks
Ugliest little boy
that everyone ever saw.
That is what everyone said.
An Old Tale Re-Told
© Madison Julius Cawein
Well, the laughter of Yule was turned to tears
For them and for us. We saw the glare
Of torches that hurried from chamber to stair;
And we heard the castle re-echo her name,
But neither to them nor to us she came.
And that was the last of Clara of Clare.
English Eclogues I - The Old Mansion-House
© Robert Southey
STRANGER.
Old friend! why you seem bent on parish duty,
Breaking the highway stones,--and 'tis a task
Somewhat too hard methinks for age like yours.
The Master-Cook
© Rudyard Kipling
With us there rade a Maister-Cook that came
From the Rochelle which is neere Angouleme.
To Mrs K____, On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris
© Helen Maria Williams
What crowding thoughts around me wake,
What marvels in a Christmas-cake!
[little tree]
© Edward Estlin Cummings
little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower
Nights on Planet Earth
© Louis Zukofsky
Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the skyand a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very airis a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).
Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey
1
Postpartum Blues
© Joseph Brodsky
But what's in the way
To the way in? God,
That desperate explanation,
Mentor and tormentor, giving us
The duties of paradise,
What The Snow Man Said
© Vachel Lindsay
The Moons a snowball. See the drifts
Of white that cross the sphere.
The Moons a snowball, melted down
A dozen times a year.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 105
© Alfred Tennyson
To-night ungather'd let us leave
This laurel, let this holly stand:
We live within the stranger's land,
And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.
Hymn For Christmas Day
© John Byrom
Christians awake, salute the happy morn,
Whereon the saviour of the world was born;
Michael: A Pastoral Poem
© William Wordsworth
Thus in his Father's sight the Boy grew up:
And now, when he had reached his eighteenth year,
He was his comfort and his daily hope.
