Christmas Eve
Muddy footprints
straddle
the morality we use
to justify the poor,
the rejected and mentally taxed,
the difficult,
lying in tents
at the edge of town
as rain pelts mansions
along the river.
I got my pneumonia shot,
my heater fixed,
but somewhere
just under the skin
I feel the dampness.
___________
Gary Lark
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
And charity is a coat you wear twice a year (George Michael, Praying for Time)
It is the ability (ability: either you have it or you don’t) to see all fellow humans as equals when everything we value in society wants us to believe otherwise. To unite, to look past what’s different in order to find what is shared, to discover that people are people. People – such a unifying word in these days when division is weaponized and monetized. Unifying, like this poem, which from its den under our skin offers us a damp reminder of what Christ-mas should be and what our share of Christ-mas should be. To start sharing not the riches and the gains, but the hunger, the losses, the wounds, the cold, the dampness.
Review by Dave Mehler
I love this poem. Gary is always talking about the ‘least of these’ as Jesus referred to them–the crushed in spirit. The ‘other.’ The marginalized. Those of us without shelter, security, means, sanity, gifts and abilities, abundance. That’s when he isn’t glorifying the beauty of rivers, water, fishing, rural life. Christmas seems to highlight the dichotomy of haves and have nots, particularly, because its a time when we want to wallow in nostalgia, richness in sparkly lights, warmth of drinks and hearths, family, contrasted against the winter cold and dark. Gary’s attention is always outside, on those without. I think this is the kind of attention Jesus was talking about when those in heaven approach him shyly or ashamed with bare, open hands, and he welcomes them, and tells them to their surprise that it was really him they were feeding, offering a glass of water to, or visiting in jail. Offering simple kindness, in a cold, divided, nasty world, is worth more than we could possibly guess? Apparently, if Jesus is to be believed.