This December Day

Andrei Tutunov

This December Day

Here in this room, this December day, 
Listening to the year die out on the warfields
And in the voices of children
Who laugh in the indecisive light
At the throes that but rehearse their own
I take the mystery of giving in my hands
And pass it on to you,

I give thanks 
To the giver of images,
The reticent God who goes about his work
Determined to hold on to nothing. 
Embarrassed at the prospect of possession
He distributes leaves to the wind
And lets them pitch and leap like boys capering out of their skin.
Pictures are thrown behind hedges,
Poems skitter backwards over cliffs,
There is a loaf of bread on Derek's threshold
And we will never know who put it there.

For such things
And bearing in mind
The midnight hurt, the shot bride,
The famine in the heart,
The demented soldier, the terrified cities
Rising out of their own rubble,

I give thanks.

I listen to the sound of doors
Opening and closing in the street.
They are like the heartbeats of this creator
Who gives everything away.

I do not understand
Such constant evacuation of the heart,
Such striving toward emptiness,
Thinking, however, of the intrepid skeleton,
There feared definition,
I grasp a little of the giving
And hold it close as my own flesh,

It is this little
That I give to you,
And now I want to walk out and witness
The shadow of some ungraspable sweetness
Passing over the measureless squalor of man
Like a child's hand over my own face
Or the exodus of swallows across the land

And I know it does not matter 
That I do not understand.

Brendan Kennelly

This poem - it encompasses so much.  Kennelly puts to words that conflicting sense I have of knowing that God is working, and being astounded by His nature and generosity and love, and feeling so grateful that I can just open my hands to receive. Not without "bearing in mind", as he says, the ugliness and suffering of everyday life. That part I appreciate so much. He gives thanks. How else can we live? Both are true - God's generosity and the fact of pain. This is certainly my experience of life. So that line "And now I want to walk out and witness/The shadow of some ungraspable sweetness/Passing over the measureless squalor of man/Like a child's hand over my own face/Or the exodus of swallows across the land" rings all my bells. I want that too. I want to walk out today and witness His working, receive His gifts, and give thanks - even though I don't understand.