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Two poems for Christmas by Joseph O’Brien
White Christmas and Uncle Paul’s Pear Tree
White Christmas
- Forecasters generally consider a white Christmas
- to be an inch of snow on the ground
- or an inch falling that day.
- -News Item
- But along the river bottoms, snow found no place,
- When together we went walking there
- After life fell apart.
- Your flustered hands gently wrestled
- With the chill in the folds of your overcoat.
- Frightened doves, they could not bear to be held,
- Holding to themselves
- In a barren nest untouched by tenderness,
- Yet wanting to fly from flesh to flesh
- In a birth of unmolested whiteness.
- I knew you as one who lived in minor chords and
- Your falling apart was only the latest note,
- Inescapable as the ache that comes with snowfall
- Disintegrating a forest’s edge in a flurry of silence,
- The nudging ache that waits forever.
- And I knew your latest sorrow,
- Like the winter twilight in your eyes, always
- Tinctured by stars and snow.
- Setting your hopes on a white Christmas,
- You put a quiet faith in the world’s poor weather,
- And stood to hear nervous cattails
- Tapping at the river’s crusted edge—
- There, you scanned the overcast skies with eyes
- Dark, damp, beautiful as a forest floor—
- Always an inch away from drowning in joy.
- Uncle Paul’s Pear Tree
- Uncle Paul played the hunter each Christmas –
- Out among the frozen hills with gun in hand,
- “It takes more than blood-thirst to hunt, I guess,”
- He’d say. “You have to know what’s on your land.”
- He’d come back, a bird in bag and listless
- To tell a tale. He’d fumble words in his head,
- Then begin: “Today was miraculous…”
- He’d wandered around the land of the dead
- With light snow from last night as the world’s pall.
- He’d heard a crow sing for mercy on the ridge,
- And in an old pear tree he’d found his soul.
- “Like Saul for David, I chased that partridge…
- That pear tree always drops an early fruit,
- Yet each year it gives me a bird to shoot.”
Joseph O’Brien
Joseph O’Brien is the poetry editor for the San Diego Reader.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Two poems for Christmas by Joseph O’Brien
White Christmas and Uncle Paul’s Pear Tree
Two poems for Christmas by Joseph O’Brien
White Christmas and Uncle Paul’s Pear Tree
White Christmas
- Forecasters generally consider a white Christmas
- to be an inch of snow on the ground
- or an inch falling that day.
- -News Item
- But along the river bottoms, snow found no place,
- When together we went walking there
- After life fell apart.
- Your flustered hands gently wrestled
- With the chill in the folds of your overcoat.
- Frightened doves, they could not bear to be held,
- Holding to themselves
- In a barren nest untouched by tenderness,
- Yet wanting to fly from flesh to flesh
- In a birth of unmolested whiteness.
- I knew you as one who lived in minor chords and
- Your falling apart was only the latest note,
- Inescapable as the ache that comes with snowfall
- Disintegrating a forest’s edge in a flurry of silence,
- The nudging ache that waits forever.
- And I knew your latest sorrow,
- Like the winter twilight in your eyes, always
- Tinctured by stars and snow.
- Setting your hopes on a white Christmas,
- You put a quiet faith in the world’s poor weather,
- And stood to hear nervous cattails
- Tapping at the river’s crusted edge—
- There, you scanned the overcast skies with eyes
- Dark, damp, beautiful as a forest floor—
- Always an inch away from drowning in joy.
- Uncle Paul’s Pear Tree
- Uncle Paul played the hunter each Christmas –
- Out among the frozen hills with gun in hand,
- “It takes more than blood-thirst to hunt, I guess,”
- He’d say. “You have to know what’s on your land.”
- He’d come back, a bird in bag and listless
- To tell a tale. He’d fumble words in his head,
- Then begin: “Today was miraculous…”
- He’d wandered around the land of the dead
- With light snow from last night as the world’s pall.
- He’d heard a crow sing for mercy on the ridge,
- And in an old pear tree he’d found his soul.
- “Like Saul for David, I chased that partridge…
- That pear tree always drops an early fruit,
- Yet each year it gives me a bird to shoot.”
Joseph O’Brien
Joseph O’Brien is the poetry editor for the San Diego Reader.
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