Friday, December 24, 2010

John F. Dean, "Driving to Midnight Mass"

Five-thousand million years ago, this Earth lay heaving in a mass of rocks and fire
Wasting, burdened with its emptiness.
Tonight, when arthropods and worms and sponges have given way to dinosaurs
And dinosaurs to working, wandering apes
Homo erectus have given away to sapiens and he to homo sapiens sapiens

Look down on Dublin from the hills around
And lights could be a million Christmas trees, still firs standing
While in the sky a glow, as if of dawn
This day a light shall shine on us
The Lord is born within our city
Look along to the river toward O'Connell bridge
The lights, the neon signs, all stream on water like breathed-on strips of tinsel
All is still.

11:30, pubs begin to empty. Men stop to argue and say the name of Jesus.
For those who have known darkness, who have now seen a wondrous light,
Those who have dwelled in unlit streets, to them the light has come.
Tonight, few cars go by.
The blocks of flats with windowed plastic trees and fairy lights stand watching for a miracle.
Here are no dells where fairies might appear.
Out from the dark, an ambulance comes speeding, sickly blue lights search in siren-still.
The mystery of the night ticks slowly on
It will pass and leave memories of friends and small, half-welcome things.
In him was life, in him life was the light of men.
For neither prehistoric swamps nor trilobites,
The mesozoic birds, Neanderthal nor modern man had ever dreamt or seen what was our God.

The shops are gay with lights and bright things,
All save funeral homes--they dare not advertise their presence
As midnight peals and organs start to play, two cars meet headlong in a haze of drink.
The crash flicks into silence.
Pain crawls like slime through blood and into limbs.
God is revealed: a baby, naked crying in a crib.
In the church porches and out along the grounds, teenagers laugh and swear, smoking, watching girls.
So, once more, Christmas trails away,
Its meaning moves back into the mist and the march of time.