The Annual Christmas Poem

At the Messiah Sing-Along

Don’t you make me just stand in the audience.
No, I must go spinning down, turning in and around.
Into singers I’ll jump, into words, into sound.
I’m much more than I look
spinning down, turning around.

It’s unfair. Sometimes I just can’t stand any more
playing I’m this one body, this person, this bore.
Playing all of life’s dead spots are real to me. Me!
Who can jump into people and see what I see.

But this music somehow turns the game into sound.
Breaks the rules, shakes us out of our bodies. I’ve found
I can rise from my seat, be whoever I want:
The smart tenor, the violins tasting like pie,
the oboist squeezing lush scales from a reed.
Free! One flash and I leap out again, choose this time
to feast on the tall man who teams up with God
to make the world shake, and makes it shake loud.

I’m so weary of our human “What not to wear,”
needing such things as hairstyles at all, acting like
the proud baboon owners of nose-ful of air.
All that “being one grownup,” one body shut up
in the so-strange illusions of life we have here.

Set free here in this concert, admit it. I’ll dare:
Yes, I’m sick of the usual cruelty and pain,
where I hear machine mouths, all their love, all switched off.

Just this night, let’s be circus here, trapezers all,
tumbling at will into souls. Juicy. Wide.
Let us scramble like puppies, not cut off from God
but Emmanuel, all the time, bursting the cloud.

Snow! Let’s snow-tumble down into a song
that everyone knows, everyone, twirling down.
Why wait longer to sing Halleluliah?
Or pretend that a single soul in this full house
wants, or ever has wanted, anything else?

So we’re singing our longing while holding our scores.
We’re not heavenly host but so very human
and singing off-key is the least of our problems
since sometimes we feel terribly stuck into “lost.”

I can feel that. I fall into faces. And now,
riding on sound, I can go anywhere
So I quickly choose the brave one singing “Rejoice,”
go rattle her teeth, or her cage, squeeze through terror until,
in her mouth, I taste bliss
while that last luscious note brings the audience peace.

We all want that to last now, we all want one voice,
crave reunion, God saying, “Game over. Test passed.”
Politely the audience sits, concert done,
sitting still now, except for the tears in our eyes.

Rose Rosetree
www.rose-rosetree.com
Christmas 2009