Christmas Poem 2020: Pandemic Christmas
Because Joy Still Can Stick to You
Granted, my holiday poem for this year isn’t up to the usual jolly standard. However, it’s up to my usual truth standard. Besides, if you read it through to the very-stick-to-you end, you just might find inspiration.
For good reason you’ll remember 2020.
But will you remember the Christmas?
Life events grab our attention, even faces half-seen and voices half-heard
Like how I woke up at five one morning, hearing as clear as day,
Hearing a faraway woman. How she was crying,
Crying as if her heart would break,
And it had already broken, and yet the breaking would not stop.
Was that suffering woman real?
Or did she merely stand in for millions?
If you can find time to read this poem, you must be like me:
Living a Luxury Pandemic
With no miles-and-hours spent waiting in food lines
And no trying to find a happier way, just this one time, to pronounce the word “hospital.”
Even if you’re one of the lucky ones
Certain other words linger in the back of your ears
Words like “14 million Americans have caught it now.”
And “Everybody is so thoroughly sick OF it. So why won’t some of us wear our masks?”
Maybe, too, the fact of this Coronavirus Pandemic
Somehow that fact sits in a certain place
A place just in back of your eyes,
Lodged so that wherever you point your vision,
In the background you feel a grim grime, kind of a soul-coating slime,
As if you’ll be doomed for the rest of your life,
To see random images of a certain man’s selfishness and greed:
He plays at golf, if not at governing.
And yet I have to admit
And yet I have to admit it, to let in the Holy Spirit of Christmas
Letting it in every which way
Because, through all the tears, God will not leave my heart.
— Rose Rosetree, 2020. Founder of Energy Spirituality. Sterling, Virginia
