Sunday 12/13/09 found Nils Peterson with his Christmas Suite of Poetry and Song at Montalvo Center of Arts, Saratoga, with poetry reading by the Poet, followed by a marvelous unison in voice by the Symphony Silicon Valley Chorale, conducted by the dynamic Maestra Elena Sharkova.
Lastly, on Monday 12/14/09, Poetry Center San José presented its Annual Christmas Reading at the Willow Glen Library, where the Santa Clara County Poet Laureate read his poems and narrated Garrison Keillor’s Christmas stories and Jean Shepherd’s classic Christmas tale about the Red Ryder BB gun, bringing a year of memorable poetry reading to a close.
It won’t be too long before the embers spark up with a promise for 2010 after a brief respite from the Winter chills.
In the meantime, let’s continue the holiday season reminiscing Christmas with Peterson’s thoughts For This Day, a little book of poems that came to be.
“As I grew older, I found I loved the Christmas story more and more, Mary and Joseph, the angels and the stable, the wise men and the shepherds. I began to write a poem each year to send to friends. Eventually they gathered together into this narrative, For this Day…”
DECEMBER
A low morning sun threw fluttering
shadows against my window.
I thought, the angels have come.
Maybe it was just small birds, feasting
on winter berries, but I thought angels,
and thought they’ve whispered
in our ears, for something grows inside.
Our walks change with the weight of it.
Our eyes reach out for what is small, tender,
or shining. Something wants
to be born into this world,
and we grow inward and heavy with it.
FOR THIS DAY
Nils Peterson
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained…
Wallace Stevens
For this day, the sweet lowings, the brays,
the heavenly music are all for us. The world
brings us the presents we so richly deserve,
for are we not children of the Father?
For this day we sit on Mary’s blue lap
at home with ox, ass, shepherd, king, angel.
Yes, there is a Herod, but for this day
he rages off-stage in the empty city.
For this day, the trees are for us, and then,
“the whole wideness of the night.”
(From Nils Peterson's For This Day
published December 2008
by Frog on the Moon, a small press)
TOWARD THE WINTER SOLSTICE 2009
by Timothy Steele
Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.
Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.
Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.
And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And centuries of green, yellow, blue, and red.
Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.
"Toward the Winter Solstice" from Toward the Winter Solstice
(Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006, www.ohioswallow.com).
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