POETRY: Scene By Remembered Light

by Lois Beebe Hayna

On every childhood Christmas Eve

a full moon rose

over new-sculptured snowdrifts.

A moon so silver-pure it put to shame

the ornaments on the fragrant little spruce

in our living room.  We’d return to the tree

and its uncertain promises, but only after 

we’d braved those drifts and the season’s frost

to join in caroling and good cheer. In memory

that necessary moon hangs up there

essential as the new-piled snow

or the gripping cold. I close my mind

to warmer Christmases, preferring to return

to snow that sculptured itself into white barriers,

we scarred with our footsteps

as we floundered across and through them.

Regardless, I call them up again

picture-perfect, the whole scene white

and snapping cold. I stubbornly ignore reality

to hang a moon for silver accent

above the ice-glossed scene

lest you not believe in our improbable joy

in a holiday that only underscored

our scarcities.

I hang a moon at its most silvered

above each Christmas memory

because without its glow

the scene fades too dark to recall. 

POETRY: Better Weather

by Sara Walters

Fresno is December: Amber's

gold scarf, cold car door handles,

Christmas songs with swear words in them.

December is home: six hour flights

from LAX to MCO, red felt stockings

with my brothers' names in peeling gold paint,

handfuls of walnuts from our grandparents

that we carry in the bottoms of our

pockets and purses, useless and thick.

Home is music: warped cookie pans popping

in the oven, my mother's scratched Christmas CDs,

quiet breathing from my nephew soft on baby monitors.

Fallen plastic pine needles stick in the carpet

until March, and we don't mind them, prickling

the bottoms of our feet until April brings better weather.

POETRY: Gift of the Wild

by Ellen Wade Beals

On Christmas a coyote came to our fence

and ever since my dog has been visited

by dreams of running with the pack,

almost able to catch up but never quite there,

lagging, and so her back legs push off

as she sleeps in her bed, her eyes squint

as if to see between the pickets,

beyond the slats shadowed on the ground.

She wants to stalk the ducks in the creek,

no leash tugging like a conscience, to tip over

garbage cans or to rustle among the leaves

for mice, to see the moon and call to it.

Cookies, I shake the box, her reward for coming in

but she skulks along the fence, desperate for any scent,

any sense that she could follow, could still catch up.