…are always poignant, partly because Christmas brings its own nostalgias, regrets, hopes and fears. Julian Grenier in Inside the Secret Garden has posted a really lovely incident of a child who overcomes a sadness with a sense of wonder: “He had held onto something that was fascinating him, despite his upset, and he had wanted to share it with [his key person] once he felt calm enough.” Maybe that ‘wanting to share it’ is why I’m posting what I’m ending this blog post with now.
To explain: this post fulfills a promise to separate people I meet on Twitter: Bosco Peters (@Liturgy) and Zoe and Andy from Saying Goodbye (@SayingGoodbyeUK). Bosco, a priest in NZ, maintains this website, and Saying Goodbye can be found here. Their interests (hardly the right word) coincided recently when Bosco posted on mourning the deaths of infants. They coincide with mine too.
What follows is the contribution I wrote eight years ago:
Lully Lulla: For Theo, Four and Three Quarters at Christmas
A Christmas might-have-been
Whose eyes like tunnels let down into dark
Let me go to this place or that perhaps
To snowy possibilities where that hand
Is slipped in mine, and off we go:
Me unbegrudging, happy of the chance
To revel in the play, in cheap mulled wine,
Sit on the cramped school chairs, be proud
As one small tea-towel stumbles on his line.
Did I see him there? Perhaps
Some small Christmas ghost
That Dickens overlooked sits with me still
(or always); then yes I saw him there.
If not, I saw his absence only;
He was not here except
As a dim shape ahead of me
In this great blizzard of regret that for a moment
Blinds my steps to Christmas.
They can also, of course, be funny, charming, fraught, competitive… Boscos’s blog has a link to something I think is an exemplary use of video – and a real baby!
nicktomjoe 