[Leica] Favorite Christmas Poems

[bill_clough at yahoo.com (Bill Clough)]

USA
TEXAS
CORPUS CHRISTI
25 December 2007

Hi there--

   Inspired by Ken's sharing his favorite Christmas poems, I offer one from 
my collection:

 A cold coming we had of it.
Just the worst time of the year
For a long journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The  very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on the slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbert.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

   Then, at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

   All this was a long time ago, I remember.
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth of Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence of that and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different. this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
                                  T.S. Eliot
                                  Journey of the Magi.