waiting for santa

It seems that, like an excited 9 year old, I'm still awake at almost three on Christmas morning, despite my best efforts to drop off before page 600 of Anna Karenina. Excitement over presents, or lack of sun messing with my sleep cycles? I don't know. In any case, I thought I'd post a poem I wrote about four years ago now - how time has flown. Yet some things don't change. 

Mass on Christmas Morning

This morning it’s different

My fingertips, skimming holy water,

Have lost their brisk impatience.

Pews full of foreign fathers and alien clans.

Old biddies wheeled out guiltily.

Normally scattered morse code, today

We rub shoulders like recalled truants, a medley

Of fine, cool smelling coats, shoulders

Rain-strewn with mercury,

Of renewed Celtic hoops

And the rustling fibres of unwrapped costumes.

Four lighted candles and the spindly tree

Loom over the mute children’s liturgy

Uncoaxable and unamused.

And I’m bubbling among the cronies,

Thoughts on stomach-fluttering packages;

Window-misting oven smells.

I know next week I’ll pick mental holes in the sermon,

Endure the syncopated choir and the neverending

Parish Bulletin.

But today-isn’t this enough?

I’ll welcome the respite, add my voice to the chorus

Letting it melt into the gaggle

The old-known words brimming with the unarticulated

Reaching and relief of unexceptional lives.

I’ll sink into the transient comfort

Of happiness en-masse, without squinting

Beyond the curtained tabernacle.