Is it really almost the middle of January? Where did the holidays go? The severe snowstorms in Portland, Oregon, last week meant my sister got several days off work. Her accounts of building a snowman, bringing in plenty of wood for the fireplace in case they lost electricity, and playing with her daughter brought the season back to mind, as did the other holiday greetings that continued to arrive in the mail.

As time goes by, those family photos, Christmas letters, and cards become more cherished in the pile of paper that constitutes the mail. I dive through the stack looking for stamps rather than postmarks and hand addressed envelopes. The pearl that I found last week included a remarkable poem from friend/artist/poet/professor John McDowell.

—Bonnie Dwyer

Already This December

—with reference, in part, to the poem "Jesus" by Robert Hilles

By John McDowell

Already this December a train in Southern Russia
blows up and forty people die. A woman in Moscow
blows herself and five others into eternity where the wind
whistles with a shrill voice. In Afghanistan, just south
of Kabul, an allied bomb explodes: nine children
playing soccer shredded to fragments of clothing and shoes.
Near Mosul two soldiers, die, ambushed. On NPR
a doctor explains how every thirty seconds a child in Africa,
dies of malaria, This is not the poem I want to write.
This is not Gloria in Excelesis Deo. This is the news,
live on the hour, twenty-four-seven. We are here
with all the lights on all the time calling out
for the season behind the plastic Santas, the lit candy canes,
the reindeer in palm trees, and my seven-year-old son’s
desire for an Imaginext Battle Castle, for God does not
care for loud explosions and claim that after all this
time he is growing hard of hearing—
a plausible fact given such long exposure, night and day,
to choirs of Cherubim and Seraphim. Who can stand it?
No wonder the belief, that given all the clamor, few prayers
get through. No. God is not on Survivor or in the newsroom.
No matter how many channels on your TV.
Inside God’s head it is not crowded with CNN or FOX
or even the Newshour With Jim Lehrer. God needs less
than we think. His rooms are boundless and it is impossible
to say what doors open and close or what shadows linger.
Jesus was born because God noticed things. He noticed how
the continuance of shadow follows every gesture, every reach
of a hand and in the stable he noticed how the same shadow
fell across Jesus’ face even history could not erase even now
as he moves from room to empty room where written in a tiny,
neat calligraphic hand our names cover the walls—floor
to ceiling twelve feet high. Even when he leaves and goes
out on one of the many doors to walk through a vineyard, or even
to walk across the lake it does not matter. He can't shuck us off.
Even as we breath or sigh, he is there in the corner, cap in hand
holding up his cardboard sign, Do this in remembrance of me
we do not read or notice whatever coins we throw his way.
He is patient, knows his best chance is a whisper that will
strike us to the bone and on Christmas morning we wear
sunlight like new shoes we never want to take off.

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