Photography © Lauren Shear

 

Canto XXIII

Another Christmas bereft of gift,
Of money, of possessions, of food,
For the most part, most associations,
And specifically, the gathering of family,
That everlasting foundation
Ever so specious, so illusory and fleeting,
While putative redundant thoughts that
All others are in harmonious groups of alliances
As euphonic as music most unconstructively,
If not deleteriously, gathering like amyloid plaque
In the wild thickets of the tangled neurons
Of an Alzheimer’s diseased brain.

Isolated and alienated as I am
In this degree of coldness once again,
In this blizzard of my nothingness,
This isolation of Christmas dimensions;
And yet it can be argued that I have
Little reason to grouse
When that greatest of gifts,
Life, was not taken in war and
Still courses in my body while
Other lives were taken gratuitously,
Unwarrantedly, wantonly–No,
Not that they “were taken”
As I, in small but significant ways,
Took them vivere ex rapto,
Selfishly, savagely, I did,
From reflexes of survival,
Which, eo ipso, denied others
Of their lives, their right
To the gift of some life continuum,
If nothing but a minute more
Which a million other factors could stop
But the agent of stopping here was me.

And as such, the reverberations of justice
And equilibrium demand
That I should know no more happiness,
And feel no rest with the dead in the active mind
Haunting me incessantly, and the roamings
Of every stray animal in the mess
Of the mass of men taunting me with forebodings
That this creature that domesticates and fosters
Animal dependency only to abandon them
And allow these creatures to breed and starve on the streets
Will one day be seen as the most void of decency
That there ever was, and will one day have his reckoning.

But this semi-stray dog is alive and grateful
For the chemical agent of nitrogen diluted oxygen
Breaking down the glucose
Of my food, feeding the ecosystem
Of bacteria, protozoa, fungi
And my own human cells
That constitute an inner me,
And welding the protein girders
Of the container, this third,
Of an external me.

Life is so far from the imagined
And the aspired, but there it is
In the state it is
Amongst the cold icy waters,
Leaky but still steady, a raft
To ride the array of vagaries and
Vicissitudes. If discontent,
One is in an idyllic future
Not of the substance of real life
And ceases to be cognizant
Of the pleasures to be had in the ride

With ample health and ample pain, I
Constrained in handicaps as I am,
Am cognizant of the veracity of the platitude
That life is a gift even though
The blessings of never having gone to war,
Not having taken life, are never again in my grasp.
I, almost destitute,
Must prostitute myself
Even to procure the vary basics
And must, to glimpse
The rarefied, the noble,
Defy the survivalistic mode
Of my being by resisting
Hording even such crumbs
To ensure that the shell shocked soldier
Little Baby, as I call him,
Has his share of morsels,
Has his space under a leaking roof
Despite this endless weeping
That is travail and torment
To listen to for any extended period.
I give as there is gain
In virtuous attempts
Regardless of how petty
And with renewal from
The gift of breath
How am I so destitute when
Nothing is but what my thoughts
Make it so

So if ineluctable redolent memories
Always attempt to pin me against shadows
Of they who once were
I shall not resist the pinning
But allow this condensation of tenacious memory
To finally dissipate and show
That concrete reality of the here and now
Is the more empirical of the lesser shadows

 

Steven David Justin Sills is an American poet and novelist living in Bangkok Thailand. His first book of poetry was published by Professor Clarinda Harris at Towson State University. A scanned copy of this book is in the Internet Archive. For the past year and a half he has been writing about the conflict in Ukraine although, most dishearteningly, the conflict there seems to pale next to that which is being experienced in Palestine (the old usage of this word includes Israel). It is partly due to this factor, and the fact that his Master’s degree is a humanities/classical studies emphasis (great books of the Western canon) that he is now considering writing a treatise on Ethics and discover in his own way what man is and the proper way he must govern himself. This Christmas poem employs the theme of thanksgiving and gratitude even in the most dire situations.

Lauren Shear is a museum professional, public historian, and lifelong resident of Massachusetts. She has been working with activist groups since college and has been seeking ways to support communities under attack ever since.