Christmas in Isolation

Poetry is what happens to you when you really should be writing essays... I'm rather fond of this one though. Enough to have a go at recording it (full text underneath):

---

CHRISTMAS 2020

Please wait, the host will let you in;

The meeting is about to start –

You’ve got your Christmas jumper on,

A rigid grin, a grudging heart, 

A drink that you don’t want in hand,

An exit strategy pre-planned.

You love the faces on the screen;

You’ve loved them, every day since March

A little more – and even then

You leave them daily in the lurch; 

It feels as much as you can do

To keep on top of keeping you.

And meanwhile all the web-wide world

Is page refreshing for a sign

Of AstraZeneca’s brainchild,

Or one, perhaps, of Pfizer’s line;

A saviour in a chilled pipette

By which our hopes and fears are met.

For now, it’s carols from our doors,

And reindeer in the windowpanes

That rainbows graced not long before,

And charitable food campaigns

For jobless households scraping by,

As businesses are left to die.

And Amazon on Christmas Eve

Is skinned with silver bells and flowers –

The guilty haunt of those who leave

Arrangements till the final hours;

If Santa doesn’t fill your socks

Tonight, try checking your inbox.

And is it true? And is it true

This most perplexing tale of all,

Told by a tyrant’s retinue:

A sovereign in an ox’s stall?

Born to elect the sons of earth –

Or killed resisting them from birth?

And is it true? And if it is

Then which is it – or is it both? 

Two thousand years have come to this;

A cheek-by-jowl of force and love.

“The Word was flesh” does not compute;

You start to think the Word’s on mute.

And yet, beneath the tinseled skin,

Above the scientific highs,

Amid the governmental din,

There is a voice from somewhere cries

That God was human once, and now 

This changes everything ... but how?

Carolyn Whitnall, 2020 (with thanks / apologies to Betjeman).

---

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it... (John 1:1-5)