A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letter

with a verse commentary

Upon the sullen sidewalks now
That stare as solemn as the snow
Each januaried public mask
Sets thin-lipped to the season’s task
Of adding to the storeclerk’s haunted
Life, things broken, things unwanted;
The miracle has not occurred
Or if it has we have not heard,
And all returning Magi come,
Puzzled and feeling taken, home,
To bait the manager, bell the clerk
And drive mail carriers berserk.
In Bethlehem there came to pass
A pain in the twentieth-century ass,
Bearing as much as it is able
It bears no virgin to a stable;
All the falling snows foretell
The stranded motorists raising hell;
Any strange angelic light,
UFO or satellite;
From Main Street to the very Firth
of Forth we praise a virgin birth,
But Science if we wish today
Brings any miracle to bay,
For any common jane or joe
Can take his fifty cents and go
To where the nation’s freight is docking
To buy the latex christmas stocking;
The downest jack, the blushest jill
Can pray the Doctor for the Pill;
Thank God God did not wait until.
Tra la.
What child at any christmas door
Has not heard it all before
From any sundayed business bore
Who is convinced machines will scan
The riddling soul of mortal man;
Take any skewness, any verve,
And force it to the belling curve,
The square root of his sigmaed soul?
My mouth and anus are a whole
That feed the solitary part,
The ghosts who haunt my human heart.
We celebrate a virgin birth
But fear the archetypal dearth
Of old year dead and no returning
Eostre risen, and out burning
Winter solstice must declare
Hope of crocus blooming where
The blessed risen Christ will glory
In Income Tax and Inventory;
We celebrate a virgin birth
But something hollow in our mirth
Works envy at our children glad
And makes us all a little mad.
In truth, these Modern Times are hard,
One joins a church or joins The Guard,
And any campused Cicero
Puts on a posture or a show,
And common Catos end their ploy:
God Bless the West, and bomb Hanoi;
And any day a man may meet
On any demonstrating street
The mad misguided Christian eye:
Martyr me, sir, or die.
The people wait on anxious knee
Grown cold, crown colder by degrees
(I choose the metaphor I please):
The Metaphysical Skimmity-Ride
That came in on a hee-hawed hack,
Evil and Goodness, back to back.
The miracle was crucified.
Unless Statistics lie, we know
Who voted yes, who voted no,
Who cracked a joke, who felt a pain,
Who answered roll-call, who abstained,
Who bought a drink, who made a scene,
Who deviated from the Mean,
Who took, at Caesar’s own request,
The Pilate Personality Test
And landed in the lower bands,
With this notation: wrings his hands,
N. B. it may be piety
Or Average Anxiety.
O Pilate, democrat of note,
Who let the puckish public vote
And heard the orison of the nation:
God Bless the Standard Deviation.
Not knowing what the legions do
Daily to other causes, rue
Will not permit a celebration
Either to Caesar or the nation;
It takes no Tacitus to scan
Beyond the Wall of Hadrian
The ancient woaded face, the bone
Honed finer than our western own;
All for a helmet full of pearls
The Tenth was loosed upon the ceorls?
It was the Vestal Virgin, sir,
Whose wrath no Caesar can incur;
Because that Celted island, kelped,
Pledged Vercingetorix and helped
Against the twin the old bitch whelped?
It is our own stupidity
Reads us that lie, cupidity
Was his warm catalyst, to get
The legions camped, to hedge the bet;
And so the legacy of rue:
I dislike what the Druids do.
And downed the dregs of his own chalice
In Pompeiana by the palace
Casca spoke to downtown Dallas;
Evil for Evil in return
Burns Portia, and whole cities burn.
The dead, the dying and the quick
Make up the body politic
Whose head, grown larger by degrees,
Has quite forgot its mortal knees,
Or reads the rude plebeian shout
As simple growing pains or gout,
Or tells the crowd in blank dismay:
I thought I saw you yesterday;
Or patiently, statistically:
I’ll win the war and set you free.
Since Freedom can forget its knees
Or weight them to parentheses,
What matters Asia’s trembling shanks
Trebling a shrill refrain: No, Thanks;
We wish you well, but in the best
Interest of all, young man, go West.
The daily manned Computers scan
Alternatives for Modern Man
And give the Ultimate Conclusion:
Non sequitur, there’s some confusion;
No mortal savior comes to Rome
Who swears he’ll bring the legions home
But that the fat Patricians pout:
My contract says send legions out;
The people wait on anxious knee
While the Computers disagree
And Statisticians shift the polls
In each of our laputaned souls;
Upon a land of Rice and Pain
We let the island down again.
If virgin Clio that we woo
Tell any truth, if truth be True,
She rings like any christmas bell
Loosing her brazen tongue to tell
The school boy that the USA
Read SPQR yesterday,
That any island dignity
Sinks simpering in a sewered sea,
That any Jew or Gentile hope
Can end up in a cake of soap,
That any little waspish man
For any waspish reason can
Climb like Zaccheus in a tower
And toll out any man-jack’s hour.
What Clio tells us of the past
Is that the present will not last,
The instant that I set it down
It takes a tuck in Clio’s gown;
Dame Clio is a bawd of note
Who does not mind a motley coat;
Dame Clio is an ancient bitch
Who taught Madame DeFarge a stitch,
Who nods when great ideas come,
But of the future? Sir, she’s dumb;
To her Verbenna is as new
As an American Boo-Hoo,
And omnilingual: Here they come!
At Bunker or Janiculum
Is quite the same as: There they go!
Mesmer the same as Mesmer’s toe;
Why not, since Clio is a muse,
Adopt her universal views?
Because her Juggernauted Cart
Ditches my tumbrilling human heart.
Let Clio rest the while,
The virgin of the classic style,
The girl the undergraduates hate
Because she won’t on any date;
It is not she we celebrate.
We celebrate the birth instead
Of Jesus who was dead
But who is risen now
And owns the snow and runs the plow.
The same oxymoron
Can put a coat of kindness on:
Not what I know or thought I knew
But awful thought: Go Thou, and Do.
Q: O Christ, do you approve?
A: Is it a form of Love?
The Statistician has no name
If everybody does The Same;
What makes the Statistician fuss
Is meeting things analogous
That cannot be the things they are:
A Star is a star is a star is a star;
He must insist that love is love
And dare the Median to move;
Young Bachelors of Guilt Insurance
Dancing the old Statistics dance:
Joseph, it must come to this,
Your items need analysis,
Your Mary’s claim to heavenly voice
The worst of any Multiple Choice,
Yours is a common Mortal joy—
Congratulations on your boy.
O little town of Bethlehem
As Clio sighs and mends her hem,
Ring out wild bells to the wild sky
And square my circled heart with pi.
The age’s poet tells us so:
The Virgin is a Dynamo.

Now every rabbit is unhappy,
The trees are arrested, the frozen sap
Recommends nothing, the silent casting
Goes great-eyed home;
The day dooms surely, fanged and howling
The night is full of owls.
In the ancient tunnel conied, dumbly
They dream of summer.
There is a silence in the turning day,
The turning year, as that of woods, the graying
Silences of deeping winter woods,
The snows, the seasons silent,
The solsticed silence of one’s wintered soul
Whose flame cajoling
Beckons the tallest star, the coldest coming,
Winsomest wished-for, dream of summer.
What is our dream of summer but a dream,
Our wintered hearts the so of simply seeming
What we assume our seeming so to be?
To be our seeming, summered,
O, to be ancient wished-for dream in windy-weathering
Wrought so together;
And all our seeming so one sum of seeming:
The simple So of summer of our dream.