I want to write Christmas cards this evening
I want to write notes of thanks, of love, of hope and light and possibility; of joy and tradition, of memory and faith in the divine and the human
I know all those things are needed
I want to write them and then sign my name beneath them,
to bond myself to those gifts.
But instead I find poetry from Gaza, lines revealing the heartbeat of a human of substance and heart and wonder,
before his heart was stilled by something alien heavy and metallic aimed and falling from a white December sky.
Again I want to write Christmas cards, I do. They are open on the table. The pen is there. The stamps are there.
But instead I see the face of a man of the kibbutz October 7; I see moving images of this man bouncing a child on his knee and singing and smiling; I do not know him and yet, I know him;
and only today, two months and more after, the news that he died on that very day and is gone and only his body since is hostage.
I want to write Christmas cards, and believe me I will, and they will stand as witness of a rebellion, of an uprising that insists on life, that persists toward peace – for the poet, for the man singing to the child, and all the sisters and brothers of each of them, of both of them, of all of them
on either side of the senseless lines sensible people draw by hand in the sand in this and every generation, lines that sooner or later explode. And stop the heart. And silence the song. For a season.
So tonight it is all I can do to open Christmas cards sent me, to hold them, to read them, to feel my life strengthened by them in ways the kind senders might not have expected.
But that is the way of words that reach from one soul to another and whisper in the midst of the dark and say, do you see there? it is there. do you see it? a tiny promise of light.
Tomorrow I will write the cards and send them outward in the hope of confirming that muted light.
12.22.23
Believe it. 