|
THE CHRISTMAS TREE
Ellin Anderson
At midnight in
the month of May,
The little tree-frog sings away:
A minstrel trilling for his life
To kill my sleep, and get a wife.
The lady-frogs have left the lawn,
And so, until the blush of dawn
Touches the stone nymph by the pool,
She is his idol, cold and cruel.
The arborvitae down below
My window holds this Romeo,
Surpassing bold, to think that he
Should climb to heaven on a tree.
Midsummer comes, and he is still,
Either to starve, or have his fill,
For silence is the daily bread
Of both the happy and the dead.
In pools and marshes, singers all
Are mute when Summer turns to Fall,
And in the face of Winter's blast,
My fancy chases Yuletides past.
Now, with a length of garden wire,
I bind the green tree's triple spire
So that it points to suns afar,
And crown it with a golden star.
Asmodeus and Beelzebub
Will shriek to see my little shrub
In lights and beads and tinsel dressed,
Just as they wailed to see the best
Of heroes on the holy tree,
Dead — to awaken gloriously,
Like heroes not so long ago,
Fallen in fields of virgin snow.
Axis of the living earth,
Promise of the Sun's rebirth,
Bravely decked in red and gold
Like a soldier in the cold!
Sing Laudate Domino,
Qui estis in convivio —
As it glitters through the storm,
My Christmas tree will keep me warm
In dead of Winter, promising
That I'll chirp through another Spring.
© 2008 by Ellin Anderson. All rights
reserved.
No part of this work may be copied or used in any way
without written permission from the author. |
