The moon moves just out of reach of the mountain
That rises behind the town like an image of man's desire
By its light the roofs and steeple of the town look just like copies
Of this same image as it is spent with less force.
The moon, in its rising, lifts in the night of our human world
The promise of another world,--of which it is the soft reflection.
The mountain is the giant shadow it gives rise to and that moves up the valley
Just as the lights are being put out in the houses below,
That dissolves the roofs in the darkness of a completer oblivion
Before the return of the little consciousness moonlight allows:
It is the moon that sets the stars in the frost on the windowpane.
In this town, snuggled tightly beneath their blankets,
With the mountain now as only some dark outline in the head,
The people go over their shopping trips in preparation for the season's joy;
Christmas is the season of the sacrifice each makes
Toward the day when, in ribbons and bows, he will feel the Easter of his joy.
With prayers on his lips and in the garden of the charity in his heart,
Each hopes, alone in the dumbness of his thoughts,
That his hands contain the gifts another will be grateful to him for;
In bed, he passes again the crowds of people he hardly knows with packages on the street,
Walking before the windows which, no matter how much we buy, we never seem able to touch;
Walking before the signs which the season seems especially proud of:
Hire the handicapped; it is good business. He feels himself jostled by the crowds
Turning up the streets, climbing the hills of their giving,
That makes them feel easier by what each Christmas contains of the first,
When as children in their beds they knew that everything below was theirs;
As they mill through the stores looking for someone's drop of blood
That they can make their own, filling the wooden crosses of the aisles with their feet,--
Their arms like the branches of the trees killed to make the floor,
He feels each reach made to test the vessel they have come to carry their giving in:
A shawl for grandmother, a pair of the sheerest stockings for mother,
A doll for Dottie that closes her eyes when you lay her down to sleep;
For junior a soldier with tin eyes and a pop-gun that shoots us dead.
Christmas is the time we put flesh on our loves--
As when in bed on a Winter night we turn to our warmth
With the only present that our flesh is sacrifice enough for,
And the busy city streets dance with produce in our veins.
Outside of the sleeper's room, inside the arms in which he has fallen to sleep,
The moon slides past and the stars come out behind it
From the darkness that closes in the human search for each other at night;
The stars that have been hidden by the shining of this nearer light--
And out of all this heavenly host, three wise men once
Needed only one to guide them to the crib of regenerate man.
WOW! Beautiful.
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