Christmas Poem
I cannot write a Christmas
poem for you,
not with all those slick verses
oozing through the mail,
the schmaltzy music whining
on the radio.
But what I can do
is tell you of a December
afternoon in 1957
when I sat in Miss Cohee’s
fourth grade class
listening to the radiators clank
and staring at my scarred desktop
and how Eddie Morgan,
hunched in the seat beside me,
looked up suddenly and whispered,
“It’s snowing!”
I looked up too,
along with the rest of the class,
out the tall warped windows,
across the empty playground,
to Idlewild Avenue,
and saw that it was true:
the first gray-white dust just drifting
the blue cedars.
If you are an old believer,
even on this bluest of December days,
I would give you that pale afternoon,
the chalkdust scuffle of shoes
on the worn floor,
those children’s faces
eager as light.
— Stephen E. Smith
(From A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths.)
