Christmas, 1937
What shall the feast be called this year
That long a merry holy name had
But now comes nameless to its time?
" Jesus is born!" Undated moment
To close the vanished year, uncounted,
Of those who live in denial of death.
Then, having not lived because not died,
They say (next year), " Christ died but did not!"
Then, Christmas: Jesus succeeds Jehovah.
Until the Christian art, that changed
The eternal Semite frown
Into a coloured yearly smile,
Cannot but paint the looming voice
Under the smile, behind the frown:
There hangs the word for this year's birth-feast.
We read what seemed too terrible for sound,
Year upon year, in seeming endless
Thund'rous unrelenting death — " THE END !"
But soft the word: shaped on sealed lips
For utterance on our many own
According to the smile each can
When death has killed the corpse of time —
Even to the Merry Christmas grin
That gave the Happy New Year ghost.
How shall the feast be called?
Who dare be after Jesus now
And meet Jehovah's honest face
As the dark substance of their own,
By whose forbidding look to form
The permitted smiles of transgression?
Who dare no more to rise now,
From heaven's ages to float down
With feet of Jew, folding the Cross
Into a compact miracle —
Outstretching souls returning
For birth at last, the escaped END ?
Jehovah was continent to madness;
Christ's Father, loving to foolishness.
But the same Man were they, by Jesus.
And one the Woman and the Virgin —
Who in immaculate parturition
Bestowed a natal death at birth
On whom the Woman could not smile on
As names of peace between Herself
And that suspicious Angry Man.
The original smile is Hers —
Which, smiled in slow discretion,
He took for frowning: and so frowned.
These things are not yet tellable
In the tone of long-ago I would wish:
Christmas again confounds my mouth.
I speak as if in recent knowledge.
Perhaps that is right: the tale is young,
Though the matter old. Christmas still!
Less merry, but Jesus still the cause:
He was born — signing his name
To a tale by us to be written.
Less deathly: as the signature becomes
Our own, and crucifying hazard
Foreshortens to the death-trimmed END .
That long a merry holy name had
But now comes nameless to its time?
" Jesus is born!" Undated moment
To close the vanished year, uncounted,
Of those who live in denial of death.
Then, having not lived because not died,
They say (next year), " Christ died but did not!"
Then, Christmas: Jesus succeeds Jehovah.
Until the Christian art, that changed
The eternal Semite frown
Into a coloured yearly smile,
Cannot but paint the looming voice
Under the smile, behind the frown:
There hangs the word for this year's birth-feast.
We read what seemed too terrible for sound,
Year upon year, in seeming endless
Thund'rous unrelenting death — " THE END !"
But soft the word: shaped on sealed lips
For utterance on our many own
According to the smile each can
When death has killed the corpse of time —
Even to the Merry Christmas grin
That gave the Happy New Year ghost.
How shall the feast be called?
Who dare be after Jesus now
And meet Jehovah's honest face
As the dark substance of their own,
By whose forbidding look to form
The permitted smiles of transgression?
Who dare no more to rise now,
From heaven's ages to float down
With feet of Jew, folding the Cross
Into a compact miracle —
Outstretching souls returning
For birth at last, the escaped END ?
Jehovah was continent to madness;
Christ's Father, loving to foolishness.
But the same Man were they, by Jesus.
And one the Woman and the Virgin —
Who in immaculate parturition
Bestowed a natal death at birth
On whom the Woman could not smile on
As names of peace between Herself
And that suspicious Angry Man.
The original smile is Hers —
Which, smiled in slow discretion,
He took for frowning: and so frowned.
These things are not yet tellable
In the tone of long-ago I would wish:
Christmas again confounds my mouth.
I speak as if in recent knowledge.
Perhaps that is right: the tale is young,
Though the matter old. Christmas still!
Less merry, but Jesus still the cause:
He was born — signing his name
To a tale by us to be written.
Less deathly: as the signature becomes
Our own, and crucifying hazard
Foreshortens to the death-trimmed END .
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