Christmas 2020

Your imaginary birthday

The one we’re celebrating

With pomp every year

Is moving closer.

There is mourning in the air

And no one is waiting for

You anyway. As your shepherd in Paris

Said in a church I happened to be in

Twenty years younger

Children are waiting for

Their presents, grown-ups

For a holiday, but nobody

For your birth. You were wrong

On every account.

You warned us that the end is near

But what did you do

To speed it up? It’s us who worked hard

Denying every word you ever

Uttered to make it happen.

We ignored your nonsense

About the nobility of poverty

Got rich so we can feed the 5000

with 5000 loaves of bread and as many fish

And have as many to spare for the landfills

And things, myriads thereof

For uses you could have never imagined

Doubling in number every decade or so

You made the blind seeing

But knew nothing of the double blind

That supplies our truths

Unlike yours, heard from your father

With no regard for that blatant

Conflict of interest

You talked about love

Did you forget to make?

For if you didn’t

Studies refute you

Time and again

Based on numbers

Small values of p

That we hold true

And teach to our youth

You, who died young for the truth

The one we decided cannot

Exist in a single copy

Are an embarrassment to the

Thinking, with your parables

Devoid of data and reason

Those who still believe in you

Or hide behind the magic 

Pronouncement of your name 

Are held to be victims of strict upbringings

Or those who have not

Outgrown their childhood

You’ve been degraded

To a fairy tale to be told to 

Young children for reasons unknown.

On this day of your 

Imaginary birthday

Like on every day of the year

I’ll be without Majia

Alone like Blaise Cendrars

On an Easter in New York

More than a century ago

(Did you read his letter

To you? Will you read mine?)

But she will almost meet

With Hannah and Myrtle

In pictures transferring motion

But not the trembling

Of their being at the memory

Of times long gone

Myrtle and Majia

Children waiting

For your coming

The look on each other’s

Face when well-chosen gifts

Were opened

That joy and Hannah’s

Of her own childhood

Can you make it whole

One more time?

You, the outsider,

The party pooper

With those unwelcome ideas

And damnations

Can you bring back

That spark in the 

Souls of mother and daughters, 

For that little while?

For who but you could make

Real again that time of memory

You, with your miracles of awakening?

Flash Issue 10