CHRISTMASES
I. Greensboro
1948
When we would go home for
Christmas,
It was to my mother's
town,
Where I was the cousin
with the Yankee accent,
Who didn't like
grits:
A gentle, Southern
place:
Gracious lawns, winding
drives
In our grandfather's
Buick, past the golf course.
I see a dim American
past, parts best forgotten:
Cedar Christmas trees,
trackless trolleys,
Water fountains "For
Colored Only",
Maids summoned from the
kitchen with a bell,
Bearing trays of puffy
rolls.
Christmas would be over
and we'd go back north,
New toys stored away, my
mother crying.
II. Metairie
1977
A child's Christmas in
Metry
We called it
then,
Until our girls,
teachers' kids, would catch on.
A plumbing
contractor
Lavished new
wealth
To display for children
and parents
Along the sidewalks of a
subdivision
The lights, the moving
creatures of Christmas:
In one room, Santa's
helpers,
In another, an animated
crèche:
He watched, approving yet
sullen,
Dimly seen behind the
picture window.
It does not matter that
his home is darkened now,
That other
families
Who did not live in
Metairie then
Now drive by another
spectacle
All the more
preposterous
Further up the same
street:
Thousands of lights
blinking,
Reindeer, elves, angels,
God knows what,
A parish policeman sourly
chants:
Keep moving, keep
moving.
III. Shreveport
1982
A downtown church on
Christmas eve,
Well loved, well cared
for,
Worshippers in fine
clothes crowd together
In the old walnut pews--
it is too warm for furs:
Married daughters,
handsome nephews
In from Houston, people
we do not know:
Of all the places one
could be this night,
As lonely as any bus
station or manger.
But there is
this:
The particular tears of
Christmas,
The precise fragrances,
the harmonies
That make it palpable,
That release memory's
stubborn catch
Differ for us
each
And for every home far
from home.
I hear the sound, thin
and sweet,
O Holy
Night,
Scored for the voices of
teenaged girls,
The white light of
candles
Dancing on their
faces.
IV. Greensboro
1988
A Christmas
reunion:
Three generations of
scattered kin
Eat the same hors
d'oeuvres,
Tell the same stories as
last year.
The young are polite,
restless:
They do not know that
others before them
Have stood to have their
pictures made.
My father and I do not
ask each other questions:
He may not know where the
girls go to school
Or what he had for
lunch.
An interloper, I drive
through Irving Park
Early on a still, bright
December day.
The golfers who
Christmases ago had seemed so old
I see now are my own
age:
Their carts glide
silently in the morning sun.
Old home movies are
shown:
A single tear disappears
Into the wrinkles of my
mother's cheek.
I tell myself I would
come back here for good one day,
To these gentle
streets,
This place which,
strictly speaking,
Has never quite been
home,
A passage come full
circle, debts repaid,
Journeys ended, journeys
begun.
“Christmases” appeared in
Paris/Atlantic, Spring 1999
Robert Demaree is the author of two
book-length collections of poems, including Mileposts, October 2009, published by
Beech River Books, and a chapbook, Things
He Thought He Already Knew, published online in 2007 by Slow Trains. A third book-length collection will be
published in late spring 2014. The winner of the 2013 Burlington Writers Club
Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina,
Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where he lives four months of the year. He has
had over 650 poems published or accepted by 150 periodicals. For further
information see http://www.demareepoetry.
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