A Christmas Poem, 1980

For John Lennon

Thermostat down, the kitchen light off,
I strip and crawl into bed, shivering.
Nancy starts, without fully waking
smiles and takes me into her warmth.
I bask like a sated infant, growing
drowsy, sucking a dream-nipple.
Floating to mind: the defiant self-sufficiency
of the old Italian man staring from
the front page of a recent Daily News.
He and his neighbors refused orders
to leave their quake-demolished town.
He sat tending a fire, his little
granddaughter standing near, bundled up.
A luxury hotel room on the coast?
His soul would be corpse-cold by spring.
Let him sit in the open, near the rubble
of the village that mothered him, family
gathered around whatever they can find
to burn, and he’ll glow, scheming, figuring
two years, with help maybe one…
Yesterday I browsed Christmas cards,
looking for the Nativity I’d begun
to imagine. All the ethereal depictions
made me wish Käthe Kollwitz had drawn
the mother of god. Her Madonna, like mine,
would be plain-looking, a peasant woman
worn out by her first labor, straw sticking
to her hair, eyes showing joyful relief
as she laves the blood from her son.
No halos, just the stable’s cozy aura.
The shit dropping from the oxen steams!…

I wonder what it would take to teach the men
who hold the world hostage compassion?
Suppose I transport the Soviet Premier
and our President-elect, both in deepest sleep,
and lay them down together in a hayloft.
Each draws toward the other as they recall
in simultaneous dreams the previous lives
when they hid out in the same barn,
deserters from opposing armies, comrades in
desperation who had no language to bind them
and eyed each other with edgy trust
but at night lay down as matter-of-factly
as lovers and hugged under their blankets,
shivering, until their mothering heat
embraced them and they slept. Suppose
precisely at the end of their dream the cries
of all the babies born that instant wake them….