Dear friends, I was sitting in the dark blue of this morning and was reminded of a gift I received many years ago in grad school. My good friend Vanessa — a tall, elegant, fancily-dressed-most-days lover of all things quebecois —introduced me to the strange and wondrous poetry of Anne Hébert, who is usually more well-known for her novels. I still have the collection on my shelf and take it up every once in a while. Her prose poem about Christmas came to mind today, something I used to assign to my students as a translation project with startling and lovely results. It is a tumble of images, including war, cathedrals, the soot of centuries, and the washing of words. Let yourself be carried along and don’t think about it too hard.
Merry Christmas, dear ones!
(And thanks again, Vanessa, wherever you happen to be, twirling in one of your fabulous robes with your deliciously precise French diction.)
Noël
Christmas, rose window encrusted by the centuries, patina of soot in the tympanum of the cathedral, masks and chimera on the foreheads of men, honey and linden blossoms at the heart of women, magic garlands in the hands of children,
Dilapidated old blackboard where squeaks thousand-year-old dictations, come, let us pass the sponge old scholar, look at the other side of your sleeve - the soot of the world leaves behind a blackish lichen,
Woman, wipe your tears, here at the break of day, the promise trumpets joy, may your eye see truly, the beautiful ships trailing behind their bitter cargo, the heart swelled with dreams having burst in the sea,
Voice of an angel in the ear of a sleeping shepherd: "Peace to men of good will," the password taken up by the choir of the great wars beating the stomach of the earth, calling to one another, like equinox tides unfurling upon the sand,
The rotation of the wounded, twenty centuries on the march, the dead sprout in fields of honor, mad seeds at the mercy of hasty springs : the faces of love lose themselves bit by bit, flicker between our hands, tiny fires, armfuls of crumpled poppies,
Those we love, those we hate, braided together, sweet rosaries, lovely wild onions in beautiful barns full of wind, open memories, vast rooms straining for the return of one single step on the stair,
So many innocents between two cops, crime on their foreheads, engraved with care by a scribe, a notary, by a judge, by a priest, by all prostituted wisdom, by all usurped power, all legalized hate,
Who complains of dying alone? What child comes into the world? What grandmother, half veiled by death, whispers to him that the soul is immortal?
Heart. Tenderness. Tears. Who washes the words in the river, in the flood, the most lost words, the most hackneyed, the most besmirched, the most betrayed?
Who in the face of injustice offers a face awash with cleansing tears, which names joy to the right and misfortune to the left, who resurrects the morning like a nativity?
Christmas. Love. Peace. What searcher for gold, in the current, rinses away the sand and the pebbles? For a single word ensconced like a walnut, the flash of the Word emerging in his birth.
Beautiful. To read it is to open the window of a moving train through the landscape of the world and to feel the rush, the wind, the wonder - and then to realize it is all good because of the child.