Poem: Good Riddance, But Now What?

Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it's midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!

                    Ogden Nash

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: There Never Was Time

I wish, he said, the years would linger
And fly less fast to make me old;
My face is a mask that time’s swift finger
Models, moulding wrinkle and fold
In sagging flesh youth fashioned true
To the ageless image engraved on brass,
Of a young face Rome or Athens knew.
(There was time for youth to pass.)

Time had a long look when I was twenty;
Was there anything I had not done
And yet would do? Well, there was plenty
Of daylight left in the cycling sun.
The roughs of knowledge that wanted scaling
Loomed --- there was time to be a sage;
Time and to spare to heal all ailing.
(And time enough for a man to age.)

But now the night that has no breaking
Shadows the sun gone down the west,
And my heart in its damaged case is aching
After lost years too brief at best.
I know a journey that yet wants going,
I know a song that is still to sing,
I know a fallow that waits the sowing ---
(There never was time for everything.)

                    Byron Herbert Reece 

 

 

 

 

 

World weary

The world is weary of the past,
O, might it die or rest at last!

        Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas

 

 

 

 

 

 

Errors

Errors in religion are dangerous;
    those in philosophy only ridiculous.

            David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

 

 

 

 

 

Empty and meaningless

Time goes faster the more hollow it is.
    Lives with no meaning go straight past you,
        like trains that don't stop at your station.

            Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow Of The Wind

 

 

 

 

Take the week off!

Only twenty-seven people in Britain can explain why the day after Christmas Day is called Boxing Day, but that doesn't stop millions from marking it by staying home from work. An intriguing side effect of thus having two consecutive public holidays is that no matter what days of the week they fall on, the British can easily justify taking the whole week off.

                    Alan Beechey, Murdering Ministers: An Oliver Swithin Mystery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A poem for Christmas and everyday

I love Jesus, who said to us: Heaven and earth will pass away.
When heaven and earth have passed away, my word will remain.
What was your word, Jesus? Love? Forgiveness? Affection?
All your words were one word: Wakeup.

        Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Jews on Christmas

There isn’t enough soy sauce in the world to feed
Jews on Christmas
Huddled around steaming plates of dumplings
Discussing cinematography
Angioplasty
Lactaid
Who has lived and who has died
Shocked to hear that the hot new Hollywood star is actually half-Jewish
(and not arguing which half)
I don’t see what all the fuss is about Nathan Englander.
Yes, it’s like The Wire, but different,
Costco is a mixed blessing,
Do you trust Yelp?
On our smartphones we subtract the Chinese year from the Jewish year to see how long the Jews had to wait to try egg drop soup.
The laughter of Jews on Christmas
shakes the jade Buddha under the faux waterfall from his
sleepy serenity
And for a moment, the enlightened one opens his eyes,
smiling contently as he joins us to look at pictures of relatives at Harry Potter world.
Now he’s Jewish too.
The Moo Shu comes with little tortillas, pancakes, wraps,
whatever you want to call them.
And we wrap up the mush of last year, with all of its regrets and tzuris,
And immerse into soy sauce,
a ritual bath,
three times dipped,
and we say – this is not bad.
Our highest compliment.

                                 Daniel Brenner

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Shortest Day

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

                    Susan Cooper 

 

 

 

 

 

A 260-year-old prayer

 Lord, let me not live to be useless!

        John Wesley, Journal (22 December 1763)

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Solstice

These are dark times. Rumors of war
rise like smoke in the east. Drought
widens its misery. In the west, glittering towers
collapse in a pillar of ash and dust. Peace,
a small white bird, flies off in the clouds.

And this is the shortest day of the year.
Still, in almost every window,
a single candle burns,
there are tiny white lights
on evergreens and pines,
and the darkness is not complete.

                Barbara Crooker

 

 

 

 

It's the thought that counts

A few years ago, instead of spending a lot of time buying gifts and mailing those out,
Grandma sent checks out in cards that said "Buy your own gift."
She was a little miffed not to have received any thank yous,
until she was cleaning out her desk a few months later, and
came across the entire stack of checks she had forgotten to enclose.
We still kid her about that.

 Shared by a reader of the Carolyn Hax column
The Washington Post, 15 December 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aspirational

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to,
because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs,
something which no other species has ever aspired to.

                Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

 

 

 

 

 

It doesn't add up

Do not be oppressed by the frightful sum of human suffering; there is no sum;
    two lean women are not twice as lean as one,
    and two fat women are not twice as fat as one.
Poverty and pain are not cumulative;
you must not let your spirit be crushed by the fancy that it is.

    George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

 

 

 

 

Hard to believe

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for?
    Isn't love hard to believe?
        Don't you bully me with your politeness!
            Love is hard to believe, ask any lover.
                Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist.
                    God is hard to believe, ask any believer.
                        What is your problem with hard to believe?

                                                    Yann Martel, Life of Pi

 

 

 

 

Poem: A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come. 

                                Jack Gilbert 

Poem: Lines for a Christmas Card

May all my enemies go to hell,
Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel.

                Hilaire Belloc     

 

 

 

 

 

Better than metaphysics

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.

            Fernando Pessoa, Collected Later Poems of Alvaro de Campos

 

 

 

 

It's the thought that counts

A few years ago, instead of spending a lot of time buying gifts and mailing those out,
Grandma sent checks out in cards that said "Buy your own gift."
She was a little miffed not to have received any thank yous,
until she was cleaning out her desk a few months later, and
came across the entire stack of checks she had forgotten to enclose.
We still kid her about that.

                Shared by a reader in The Washington Post  

 

 

 

 

Spread your sails

Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth
        will always find themselves born by a current towards the open seas.

                            Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A cost benefit analysis

I can’t afford to hate people. 

        I don’t have that kind of time.

                 Kanji Watanabe, in the Akira Kurosawa movie Ikiru

 

Existential risks

This is how our species is going to die.
Not necessarily from nuclear war specifically,
but from ignoring existential risks that don’t appear imminent‌ at this moment.
If we keep doing that, eventually, something is going to kill us –
something that looked improbable in advance,
but that, by the time it looks imminent, is too late to stop.

            Michael Huemer, The Case for Tyranny, Fake Nous

 

 

 

 

Pay attention

Attention, taken to its highest degree,
    is the same thing as prayer.
        It presupposes faith and love.
            Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

                            Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

 

 

 

 

Poem: Compassion

Have compassion for everyone you meet
even if they don't want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down where the spirit meets the bone.

                    Miller Williams