Twelve hundred miles, the penance
of a confessed Grinch—
I say we will go home for Christmas
and by home I mean the place
I haven’t lived for twenty years
the family I happily abandoned
the scenes I packed up and moved
out of my heart. We will daze ourselves
driving, hug and kiss, dry-eyed
laugh a little, bring our own wine
and drink it in secret, trying
to remember how to feel. We will fall
into the old southern cadence for a time
but the glowing vision of color, carols
Momaw’s living room, gift-wrap strewn
is grayed-out, gone. I grow old
complaining of traffic and change
querulous for my own bed.
…and then one day when the possibility of them is gone, you wish you could revisit these times…
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Sure, part of what makes it so hard is that there are far too many loved ones (who were my home) now gone.
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Yes I used to complain about those family gatherings, but now that my mother and father aren’t around, I see an empty space.
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So many heart-rending but stunningly constructed phrases and images here – dry eyed crying, packing up parts of your heart…So much of it brought sharply into focus. Very immediate and raw and powerful.
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Thank you. Raw, for sure. It’s so hard to get at the (poetic) truth of these kinds of feelings. Complicated humans.
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I can empathise with the emotions, without ever having experienced a family get-together Christmas, you express them so vividly. When I was younger I used to miss the memory of childhood Christmases, never miss Christmas itself.
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It’s all so complicated, and definitely not helped by the commercial hype and unreasonable expectations.
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I just hate the whole thing. I never went back to my parents’ for Christmas after I moved to France when I finished at university. I worked on Christmas Eve so the possibility never arose. I don’t miss it though. Christmas is for little kids and family if you have them to hand. If you turn it into a big deal, reminiscences and trying to recreate a lost childhood it must be pretty dismal.
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I love this, Jennifer, mostly I think because it gives words to a lot of ambivalence I have for the holidays. And it is hard to write about negative things without sounding childish (for me, which is my problem). You’ve done this really well.
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I appreciate your vote of confidence. It is hard to write about negative things. That need to give ourselves permission to not always present only the shiny happy face.
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Right. Yes. You are correct. 🙂
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