A Christmas Carol

“Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented

  your souls

With the flanelled fools at the wicket or the muddied

  oafs at the goals.”

—Rudyard Kipling

Don’t even begin to try to understand this poem.

It is far too simple to be understood by my   august fellows, too easy

to comprehend in but only one reading, so unbeautiful and unpolished

like the sound of the toilet flushing, or, the sobs of one, lost, muddied oaf of a man, this poor, black, televised

  father squatting the curb beside his charred, fire-ravaged home, crying:

She was my baby— my angel—just four years old, always runnin’ long taggin’ with me   everywhere I went

and now: I’ll never see her again, Lord Jesus, I am losing my mind.