Tess Lockhart
  • God Poetry
    • A Preacher's Prayer
    • Advent
    • Advent Watch
    • Ordinary Advent Time
    • First Christmas Post Husband Mortem
    • Christmas Bread
    • Ding Dong Dung
    • Christmas Credo
    • Incarnation Narrative
    • Starlings in Epiphany Snow
    • Evensong in Bleak Midwinter
    • Imposition of Ashes
    • Lenten Ruth
    • Langston Hughes on Maundy Thursday
    • Maundy Thursday's Scattering
    • Good Friday Tenebrae
    • Gardening Holy Saturday
    • Mourning, Holy Saturday
    • A Little Hilaritas What If
    • Milton on Easter Monday
    • Pentecost Invitation
    • For All the Saints
    • Winter Solstice
    • Evening Prayer for the Beloved
    • Incarnation's Repair
    • The News Was Not Good
    • Just Jump Already
    • Job's Modern Lament
    • Uncle!
    • Worship
    • St. Valentine
    • Response to a Dr.'s Rhetorical Question
    • A Prayer of Praise
    • Renunciation and Adherence
  • Marriage Poetry
    • A River of Words
    • Beloved Baptism
    • Anniversary Gift
    • Aching Pain
    • Disappointment for Nothing
    • A Lament of Recognition
    • A Marital Parable Revealed
    • Kissing Death
    • Grief
    • Extinguished
    • Not Exactly Thecla
    • Rectify
    • Love Beyond Terror
    • St. Valentine
    • Divorce
    • Marital Haiku
    • A Mockingbird
    • All for Love
    • Love's Transubstantiation
    • Enough of Love's Ideal Poems
    • My Lie
  • Healing Poetry
    • A Child Abuse Victim
    • At Grandma's Funeral
    • Confronting Nothing
    • For Want of a Ritual
    • Gardening Widow's Weeds
    • Ghost Whisperer Grief Obsession
    • Grief Drought
    • Swimming with Grief's Fear
    • Five Years Post Mortem
    • Middle-Aged Dating
    • Fire and Water
    • Canoe Wrecked
    • Desire Beyond Reason
    • A Survivor's Haiku
    • Baptismal Renewal
    • Of Children, Pigs, and Priests
    • Sometimes
    • The Trickiness of Doors
    • Tenured Otherwise
    • Turtle Soup
  • Quotidian Poetry
    • Cookies for Dragons
    • Leaving My Daughter at College
    • To Mom on Her Birthday
    • On the Third Day
    • Ode to Bermuda Grass
    • Mundane Revelation
    • Sorry White People
    • Truculent Ode to Poetry
    • Twisted
    • DeFuniak Springs
Picture

First Christmas Post Husband Mortem  

In the deepest darkness of the year
I drag myself from embered hearth
to bundle against death’s cold
and gather with the other crazies

somewhere near midnight
on Christmas Eve
in the cavernous tomb of a sanctuary.

Alone in the darkness with strangers,
I listen to the bleak midwinter song
and am not warmed by the brass.
I should have stayed home in my grief.
There is no joy to the world for me,
and the angels someone else has seen on high
do not sing to me--not even second-hand.

I can’t seem to find myself in this story anymore.
Perhaps I’m a shepherd who stayed behind, forgotten. 
So I sit resigned,
a dark lump wrapped in shadow. 
Except that . . .  here I am--
in worship with other hazy figures
huddled in muffled hope.

My neighbor carefully lights
her insignificant candle

and holds it aloft for me to light mine.
I, in turn, hold forth my unsteady light,
for another to light his.   
The exchange pricks holes
in our enveloping darkness.

Together we stab our flickers of hope
into the silent night
like ancient people keeping
wild beasts at bay with torches of fire,
wide-eyed with wonder that it works.
We watch the Light gradually break forth
with the singing of the age-old song.


And suddenly I find myself found. 

                                       © 2011 Tess  Lockhart. All rights reserved.
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