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Hanukkah Candles on Christmas Eve

by on December 24, 2019

And the Light shineth in darkness: and the darkness did not comprehend it. — John 1:5

Throughout the night, the cold drew close,
And wrapped our home in shrouds of frost.
Within eight candles lent us light,
Returning to us what we’d lost.

Around us, all our village slept.
Our children safe, their breathing slow.
Eight candles gleamed beside the tree,
Their flames burned long, burned low.

Then all fell silent round my house.
The snow was blue, the shadows, slate.
You could almost hear the planet turn.
I stood bereft beside my gate.

Behind me, those I loved slept warm,
Protected by God’s endless grace.
Below me lay the village streets,
Wrapped in winter’s chill embrace.

The darkness waned, the morning loomed,
Within my house the fire grew bright.
But still I walked on fragile snow,
And prayed for greater light.

As a child I’d lived in dreams of stars,
Of Peace on Earth –life’s golden seal–
And This Night seemed, of all our nights,
The one when all such dreams were real.

Tonight I know this is not so.
The world is not as we would wish,
But as we make it, day by day,
And this is the mystery and the Gift.

The candles whisper of His Gift.
The stars reflect them high above.
The Gift is given to us again,
That we remember how to love.

for Justine Van der Leun — Mill Hill Drive, Southport, Connecticut, 1990

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Comments on this entry are closed.

  • jwm December 24, 2017, 6:06 PM

    Misty eye and a lump in the throat for Christmas.
    Thank you, Gerard, that was wonderful. Blessings and a Merry Christmas to you and yours.

    JWM

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  • Bill Jones December 25, 2017, 12:06 AM

    [——-]

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  • Howard Nelson December 25, 2017, 2:07 PM

    @ Bill Jones
    Why?
    Do you hate freedom?
    Do you prefer tyranny?
    Do you despise Jesus the Jew?
    May God bless you.

    Link
  • dhmosquito December 25, 2017, 5:57 PM

    Howard Nelson: may God bless YOU.

    And no, I am not Jewish, as if that should make a difference.

    Merry Christmas!

    chuck

    Link
  • bbirdwell December 24, 2018, 5:18 PM

    Luke 2:8-14. I prefer the King James Version. Or you can watch Linus recite it…
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNMgmf0NTO4

    Link
  • ghostsniper December 25, 2018, 4:06 AM

    Happy New Year!

    Link
  • Phil in Englewood December 25, 2018, 5:50 AM

    Merry Christmas, Gerard! Thanks for sharing your fascinating life as a Phoenix with Nine Lives. And Merry Christmas to your Mom and Editor Olivia.

    Link
  • Terry December 24, 2019, 7:33 AM

    Merry Christmas to all!

    Link

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“The weight of this sad time we must obey. / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” — Lear

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Gerard Van der Leun
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“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”

A Wicker Basket

Comes the time when it’s later
and onto your table the headwaiter   
puts the bill, and very soon after
rings out the sound of lively laughter—

Picking up change, hands like a walrus,   
and a face like a barndoor’s,
and a head without any apparent size,   
nothing but two eyes—

So that’s you, man,
or me. I make it as I can,   
I pick up, I go
faster than they know—

Out the door, the street like a night,   
any night, and no one in sight,   
but then, well, there she is,
old friend Liz—

And she opens the door of her cadillac,   
I step in back,
and we’re gone.
She turns me on—

There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,
and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie,
with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,   
and I eat it—

Slowly. And while certainly
they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket   
of these cats not making it, I make it

in my wicker basket.

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