2024 Words to Unwrap with Wonder

"The Christmas Truce"

Dear Friends,

I thought we might make “Words to Unwrap with Wonder” a holiday tradition. Last year, I offered you “Presents,” by Norman MacCaig: I give you an emptiness, | I give you a plenitude, | unwrap them carefully. | —one’s as fragile as the other. . . .

This year, I give you Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, “The Christmas Truce,” illustrated by David Roberts in children’s book form. For your enchantment, enjoy the video page-turning and voice-over by Sophie Ruthven-Stuart.

This storytime does not negate that for many of us, the holidays are leaden with loneliness, a broken heart, pain and the body’s refusals, crippling uncertainty, the horrors of war, despair about the nature and fate of humanity and our world. In fact, I hope it shines a light on the brightest reason for hope: that we share a common humanity, which, as its most fundamental mode of being, yearns to connect. This poem is radiant with human heartedness. The story it tells is true.

I am going quiet these liminal days of the Yuletide and will return in the New Year. Wherever you are, whatever your life world this penumbral season of light, may the spirit of wonder meet you and keep you in the promise of potentia, always and everywhere present.

With love to you and yours,

Renée

PS. As a gift for your ongoing support, enjoy 1/2 off ($25) annual paid subscriptions until the end of the year. See details below.

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Apologies for the advertisement on YouTube you’ll need to endure for 10 seconds!

The Christmas Truce

Christmas Eve in the trenches of France,
the guns were quiet. 
The dead lay still in No Man's Land –
Freddie, Franz, Friedrick, Frank . . . 
The moon, like a medal, hung in the clear, cold sky. 

Silver frost on barbed wire, strange tinsel, 
sparkled and winked. 
A boy from Stroud stared at a star
to meet his mother's eyesight there. 
An owl swooped on a rat on a glove of a corpse.

In a copse of trees behind the lines, 
a long bird sang. 
A soldier-poet noted it down – a robin
holding his winter ground –
then silence spread and touched each man like a hand. 

Somebody kissed the gold of his ring;
a few lit pipes;
most, in their greatcoats, huddled,
waiting for sleep. 
The liquid mud had hardened at last in the freeze.

But it was Christmas Eve; believe; belief
thrilled the night air,
where glittering rime on unburied sons
treasured their stiff hair.
The sharp, clean, midwinter smell held memory. 

On watch, a rifleman scoured the terrain –
no sign of life, 
no shadows, no shots from snipers,
nowt to note or report.
The frozen, foreign fields were acres of pain. 

Then flickering flames from the other side
danced in his eyes,
as Christmas Trees in their dozens shone,
candlelit on the parapets,
and they started to sing, all down the German lines.

Men who would drown in mud, be gassed, or shot, 
or vaporised
by falling shells, or live to tell,
heard for the first time then –
Still Nacht. Heilige Nacht. Alles schläft, ensam wacht . . . 

Cariad, the song was a sudden bridge
from man to man; 
a gift to the heart from home,
or childhood, some place shared . . . 
When it was done, the British soldiers cheered. 

A Scotsman started to bawl The First Noel
and all joined in, 
till the Germans stood, seeing
across the divide,
the sprawled, mute shapes of those who had died. 

All night, along the Western Front, they sang, 
the enemies –
carols, hymns, folk songs, anthems, 
in German, English, French; 
each battalion choired in its grim trench. 

So Christmas dawned, wrapped in mist,
to open itself 
and offer the day like a gift
for Harry, Hugo, Hermann, Henry, Heinz . . . 
with whistles, waves, cheers, shouts, laughs. 

Frohe Weinachten, Tommy! Merry Christmas, Fritz!
A young Berliner,
brandishing schnapps, 
was the first from his ditch to climb.
A Shropshire lad ran at him like a rhyme. 

Then it was up and over, every man,
to shake the hand
of a foe as a friend,
or slap his back like a brother would; 
exchanging gifts of biscuits, tea, Maconochie's stew, 

Tickler's jam . . . for cognac, sausages, cigars,
beer, sauerkraut;
or chase six hares, who jumped
from a cabbage-patch, or find a ball
and make a battleground a football pitch. 

I showed him a picture of my wife.
Ich zeigte ihm
ein Foto meiner Frau.
Sie sei schön, sagt er.
He thought her beautiful, he said. 

They buried the dead then, hacked spades
into hard earth
again and again, till a score of men
were at rest, identified, blessed. 
Der Herr ist mein Hirt . . . my shepherd, I shall not want. 

And all that marvellous, festive day and night, 
they came and went,
the officers, the rank and file,
their fallen comrades side by side
beneath the makeshift crosses of midwinter graves . . . 

. . . beneath the shivering, shy stars
and the pinned moon
and the yawn of History;
the high, bright bullets
which each man later only aimed at the sky.

~ The Christmas Truce, by Carol Ann Duffy, illustrated by David Roberts

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