[Image found accompanying the “Christmas Snow” (December 25, 2010) post at John Bedell’s bensozia blog]
From whiskey river:
Snow
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.
Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.
When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.
But why were they on his property, he asked.
(David Berman [source])
…and:
For the Children
The rising hills, the slopes
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:stay together
learn the flowers
go light
(Gary Snyder [source])
…and (highlighted portion):
In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it Christmas and went to church; the Jews called it Hanukkah and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say “Merry Christmas!” or “Happy Hanukkah!” or (to the atheists) “Look out for the wall!”
…Some of you may be unhappy with this dereligionizing of the Holiday Season, and you may have decided that, this year, you’re going to celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on The Waltons. Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: It would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall.
(Dave Barry [source])
