May This Christmas Morning Find You All Safe, Warm, & Secure . . .

Here We Go a Caroling . . .

And So Today I Still Have a Dream. . .

. . . I still have a dream today that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise up against nations, neither will they study war any more. I still have a dream today that one day the lamb and the lion will lie down together and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.

I still have a dream today that one day every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill will be made low, the rough places will be made smooth and the crooked places straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. I still have a dream that with this faith we will be able to adjourn the councils of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism.

With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when there will be peace on earth and good will toward men. It will be a glorious day, the morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy.

- Dr. Martin Luther King,
 from: A Christmas Sermon on Peace, 1967.

Kilt monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

Merry Christmas!

On the Distaff Side . . .

 

A different Christmas tradition,

 from: A Seat At the Table.

A genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of Miriam,
the daughter of Anna:
Sarah was the mother of Isaac,
And Rebekah was the mother of Jacob,
Leah was the mother of Judah,
Tamar was the mother of Perez.
The names of the mothers of Hezron, Ram, Amminadab, Nahshon
and Salmon have been lost.
Rahab was the mother of Boaz,
and Ruth was the mother of Obed.
Obed’s wife, whose name is unknown, bore Jesse.
The wife of Jesse was the mother of David.
Bathsheba was the mother of Solomon,
Naamah, the Ammonite, was the mother of Rehoboam.
Maacah was the mother of Abijam and the grandmother of Asa.
Azubah was the mother of Jehoshaphat.
The name of Jehoram’s mother is unknown.
Athaliah was the mother of Ahaziah,
Zibiah of Beersheba, the mother of Joash.
Jecoliah of Jerusalem bore Uzziah,
Jerusha bore Jotham; Ahaz’s mother is unknown.
Abi was the mother of Hezekiah,
Hephzibah was the mother of Manasseh,
Meshullemeth was the mother of Amon,
Jedidah was the mother of Josiah.
Zebidah was the mother of Jehoiahim,
Nehushta was the mother of Jehiachinm
Hamutal was the mother of Zedekiaj.
Then the deportation to Babylon
the names of the mothers go unrecorded.
These are their sons:
Jechoniah, Shealtiel, Zerubbabel,
Abiud, Eliakim, Azor and Zadok,
Achim, Eliud, Eleazar,
Matthan, Jacob and Joseph, the husband of Miriam.
Of her was born Jesus who is called Christ.
The sum of generations is therefore:
fourteen from Sarah to David’s mother;
fourteen from Bathsheba to the Babylonian deportation;
and fourteen from the Babylonian deportation
to Miriam, the mother of Christ.

Compiled by Ann Patrick Ware
of the Women’s Liturgy Group of New York

Weighing In

 - Rhina P. Espaillat

What the scale tells you is how much the earth
has missed you, body, how it wants you back
again after you leave it to go forth

into the light. Do you remember how
earth hardly noticed you then? Others would rock
you in their arms, warm in the flow

that fed you, coaxed you upright. Then earth began
to claim you with spots and fevers, began to lick
at you with a bruised knee, a bloody shin,

and finally to stoke you, body, drumming
intimate coded messages through music
you danced to unawares, there in your dreaming

and your poems and your obedient blood.
Body, how useful you became, how lucky,
heavy with news and breakage, rich, and sad,

sometimes, imagining that greedy zero
you must have been, that promising empty sack
of possibilities, never-to-come tomorrow.

But look at you now, body, soft old shoe
that love wears when it’s stirring, look down, look
how earth wants what you weigh, needs what you know.

From: Where Horizons Go, Copyright 1998.

The Sign in My Father’s Hands

- Martín Espada
                   for Frank Espada

The beer company

did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans,

so my father joined the picket line

at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion, New York World’s Fair,   

amid the crowds glaring with canine hostility.   

But the cops brandished nightsticks

and handcuffs to protect the beer,

and my father disappeared.

In 1964, I had never tasted beer,

and no one told me about the picket signs   

torn in two by the cops of brewery.

I knew what dead was: dead was a cat   

overrun with parasites and dumped   

in the hallway incinerator.

I knew my father was dead.

I went mute and filmy-eyed, the slow boy   

who did not hear the question in school.   

I sat studying his framed photograph   

like a mirror, my darker face.

Days later, he appeared in the doorway   

grinning with his gilded tooth.

Not dead, though I would come to learn   

that sometimes Puerto Ricans die   

in jail, with bruises no one can explain   

swelling their eyes shut.

I would learn too that “boycott”

is not a boy’s haircut,

that I could sketch a picket line   

on the blank side of a leaflet.

That day my father returned

from the netherworld

easily as riding the elevator to apartment 14-F,   

and the brewery cops could only watch   

in drunken disappointment.

I searched my father’s hands

for a sign of the miracle.

from: Imagine the Angels of Bread, Copyright 1996.

House By the Side of the Road

 – Sam Walter Foss

 

There are hermit souls that live withdrawn
In the peace of their self-content;
There are souls, like stars, that swell apart,
In a fellowless firmament;
There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths
Where highways never ran;
But let me live by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

 

Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by;
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat,
Or hurl the cynic’s ban;
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

 

I see from my house by the side of the road,
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife.
But I turn not away from their smiles nor their tears
Both parts of an infinite plan;
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

 

Let me live in my house by the side of the road
Where the race of men go by;
They are good, they are bad, they are weak,
They are strong,
Wise, foolish – so am I.
Then why should I sit in the scorner’s seat
Or hurl the cynic’s ban? -
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.