Christmas Eve Alone

I saw a lady on the street, no shoes,
One cloudy morning.  And what is there to lose
On Christmas Eve, at seventeen degrees?
Lord knows, it's not what any one of us would choose,

But plastic tinsel laid on rubber trees
And snot-nosed kids on shabby velvet knees
Don't quite evoke a desperate birth in straw,
But golden childhood memories of warmth and ease.

It was while coming home from work I saw
That woman.  Her fatalistic set of jaw,
Her stance, suggested a settled solitude.
One man, alone like her, died under Roman law,

Arms open, suffocating, stripped and nude.
Detritus of that life, that death, is strewed
Across the intervening waste of years.
We look away (perhaps for fear of being rude)

From suffering like hers. A clean man fears
The leprosy of secret Christmas tears,
But little guesses he the depths of grace,
For God himself, in lonely hours, bends down and hears

Her voice.  The world that didn't make a place
For him puts up a babe with rosy face,
His plastic likeness, and decries the fall
Of public morals, thinking outrage can replace

The mercy that's implicit in the call
Of him who came to this, this muddy ball
And bore such cruel rejection for the sake
Of homeless outcasts shivering outside the mall.

We throw them useless pity, forced and fake,
But no one holds a funeral or wake
When all their frigid, weary days are done.
Christ died as low a death as theirs, dying to break

Down all the social walls by which we shun
Impoverished men.  No timid hired gun,
He plunged headfirst into our earthly sludge
That he might make our scattered human family one.

He's coming back again, and he will judge
Correctly all our motives, every grudge,
Our every slighting of the Imago Dei.
He'll pardon or condemn.  And then he'll never budge.

Against the awful coming of that day,
The LORD consented that the scourges flay
Christ's back to quivering strips.  This was to bruise
The serpent's head in you.  There is no other way.
Copyright by Ike Wassom 2014.  All rights reserved.

Haiku 1

Misty cold sunrise
Burns golden dew from white buds
The first of the year

Copyright by Ike Wassom 2009. All rights reserved.

A cat, inscrutable, will never tell

A cat, inscrutable, will never tell
Of what befell before you took her in.
Down empty country lanes, through heaven or hell,
You'll never, ever know where she has been.
Her life before she came to you, meowing,
And, seeing your face, began, at once, to purr,
(At which, before her quiet insistence bowing,
You brought her food and fed her, stroked her fur
And loved her, saying she was now your own -
And overlooked her fierce, inhuman mind)
Remains a strange and winding path unknown.
You might as well have tried to own the wind.
Enough to say your lives have intersected
And friendship bloomed in ways most unexpected.

Copyright by Ike Wassom 2010.  All rights reserved.

The Labyrinth: A Nightmare

Dread  Oppressive dread  Again I wake up here
in chambers delved from fear  These winding labyrinths wend
from Hell to Dad's old shed  Through attic boards I peer
from here to yesteryear  Down underneath my bed
I wander wracked with loss through endless whispering darkness
stalked by something unseen  Here dripping walls and moss
there close wood walls and stillness a plastic-faced machine
church-factories overhead  In water cold and clear
there waits a concrete bier  These twisted tunnels thread
from corners in my head down crawlspaces they veer
to spaces wide and sheer cross rivers boiling red
they wind down halls of Chaos through my opened chest
from which grows shoots of green and when I'm gone they'll cast
my deepest thoughts my pathos out on deep serene

Copyright 2013 by Ike Wassom.  All rights reserved.

Listening to the city sounds on my porch at 3 AM

I step into the night.  The air is cold
And carries in its breeze an awful din.
I-65 is not too far from here,
A metal river of humanity
That runs and hums along an asphalt bed
And carries in itself a twilit host
Encased in glass, illumed in green.  And tires
Squeal, and engines drone, and horns honk.
Beneath it all, somewhere, a gunshot rings.

The silent moonlight pours into my yard;
It fell through space, cascaded through the void,
And traveled through illimitable night
To softly fall on every blade of grass
That casts its dimly-outlined wavering shadow
Onto the waiting earth so brown and soft.

Someone out there, no doubt, is giving birth;
Another breathes his last; his life pours out
Into the dust from which he came.  And I,
I sigh, and step inside, and go to bed.

Copyright by Ike Wassom 2009.  All rights reserved.

Christmas Card 1

The swirling sleet had frozen in my beard.
A distant memory was the living green
On this, the darkest night I've ever seen.
Through shutters streaming golden light I peered
To glimpse some human warmth.
                                                   "It's as you feared;
The stars are chips of ice lacking in love.
That's all you'll ever get from Up Above.
You've got no kin, no friends, no God,"
                                                             he leered.
That night did not end well for me, I'm afraid.
But God who gives us family and friends,
Although through weary winter nights I've strayed,
Will see that every trial at long last ends,
For on a winter night he came as a lowly child
That he and I - and you - might all be reconciled.

Copyright 2012 by Ike Wassom.  All rights reserved.

A Sonnet for Jerry, a dog

His world is made of smells upon the wind,
A chained-in yard dug down to mud and stones,
The sound of heartbeats, sirens, squirrels, phones,
And human things he cannot comprehend.
Early on, he killed our cat, and grinned,
And sleeping, deep inside his chest, he groans.
He once was wild.  He still is, in his bones:
He knows of prey and pack, but not of friend.
     But though his air is lonely, grim and stark,
     He yips and skips and frolics, joyous when
     We call, and when we take him to the park,
     He's happier than I have ever been:
No sorrow for the savagery he's lost,
No doubts about domestication's cost.

Copyright 2013 by Ike Wassom.  All rights reserved.