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I.
I walk the city streets at twelve o’clock.
The late-night clubs are straightening their tiesAs dice and women grin their whisky grins.
The ashcans filling with McDonald’s trash
Blare dead “hosannas” to the frosty air.
I have watched the feet go dragging through the straw,
Shuffling the lost and fading to a cheap
Cold end. One had a brilliant mind but now
His arm is punctured, raw, his thought become
A broken pile of concepts. One knew it all,
Needed no discipline nor patient fact:
He struggles nightly with the acrid lights
To hide the challenge of his wrinkled skin.
We all believe that death is next week’s trial,
But curled against a wall to entertain
The rats are some who last week thought the same.
Cities flung loosely on the cheek of earth
Flare through the line of night, each offering
Oblivion to those who cannot stand.
Pity and social science stalk the streets,
Waving indignant fingers at the Christ
And quoting from the Sociological Rules:
They guard their dead, half-acolyte, half-crow.
New York, L.A., the cities of the plain –
The Christmas message like a ball of mist
Is shrugged aside on Broadway. Limousines
Won’t start, the addict begs his bread, and men
Beneath a rancorous unhappiness
Wander towards the old year’s close not knowing
That the Blood once spilt hangs in the air tonight.
II.
Like sandflies humans crowd the littoral:
The sea is big with sewage. Beneath horizonsThe coral isles are out of bounds. Revolt
And insurrection teach the people what
To think and those now burnt in effigy
Tomorrow face their captors and the future
In cellars where the guns cough after sentence.
The ghost of Cato stalks aghast, its hand
Denouncing all sclerosis of the mind –
The intellectual “maybes” of the West
Concerned about their bellies, fat on meat.
An industry like smallpox pits the earth,
The cardboard shanties swathe the capital,
And out at sea Poseidon is ignored
So that the oil might light Manhattan’s follies,
Titillate the London air, and wipe
The rational smile from Hamburg’s face beneath
The stupid gloss of neon. The poor desist
From mentioning themselves, restricted to
The hot and killing climates. In republics
And in the kingly presence all forget
The duty of the ruler to be wise:
Compassion is a tightened fist and if
We must give thought then let us calculate
In units of a thousand T.V. dinners.
The churches sing across the land; the shrines
Are lit, their light hangs like a tear in the air.
O lift the hand of blessing and let joy,
Unreasonable joy, descend once more on this
Sad world which wrings its fingers like a child.
III.
The Christmas feast approaches fast
To bathe with light the dull-eyed past;My thoughts encompass Eastertide
When Christ the King both loved and died;
And solaced by the Christian year
I face the world in middling cheer.
When man kills man and feels remorse,
Or helps the wounded to his horse,
Shares flies and pain in squalid shacks
Preaching to those who turn their backs,
Refuses to denounce belief
With Amin’s pistol in his teeth*;
I give assent to that small voice
Which once allowed leaves little choice.
It calls us to abandon self
And take our neighbour off the shelf,
That from a makeshift stable bed,
The moment of the broken Bread,
From Passion and Epiphany
Might come a faith to set us free;
Free to arrange as best we can
The earthly stay of ingrate man:
The drunkards and the starving all
Invited to the feasting hall,
That justice and compassion might,
Like milky dawn, make day from night.
Pray to make pure your intellect
That we be Church and not a sect;And with an un-illusioned mind
Proclaim the Child to all mankind.
* Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda, martyred at the hands of the dictator, Idi Amin, 17 February 1977.
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© December 1979
