With Christmas Season Hard upon Us
Rent from DeepDyve- With Christmas Season Hard upon Us
In the restaurant window, a sign.LEBANESE COOKING. Inside,a glitzy fir tree my husband wants near him.For the evergreen scent. The tree turns out to bea fake. We sit by it anyway,inches from its glittering cheer."A typical Middle Eastern decoration," he quips.Our waitress replies, "We're Christians,"then names her Lebanese Catholic Churcha few blocks away.
The moussaka, baba ganooj,and falafel please us. Learning a Middle Eastern Churchis nearby—the chance for Holy Land bordersto be blurred and erased—gladdens me.
Home early enough for a movie,we watch a former soldier struggle to unravel amnesia,his chronic nightmare stalling my breath as he floatsface up in a coppery sea. Israeli, he knowshe was at Sabra and Shatila. There in Beirut.For the massacres. Knows, yet remembersnothing. Then finally recalls himselffeeding flares into a launcher's maw.
Red suns oozethrough a black sky. The Israeli soldiers light the wayfor Lebanese Christians to push refugee children, women,old men—like chains of paper dolls—up against walls. [End Page 113] Palestinians with their arms splayed, with palms and facesflattened into stucco.
More than a quarter century later,safe at home, I watch a screen, seeing those Christiansfire the rifles. As many rounds as it takes.An extra to be certain.
This Christmas I wanta real tree. I too like evergreen. Nothing lessthan the haunted sting of resin in my breathwill su≈ce for such a holy time.Balsam was the balm daubed onto woundsin our own Civil War. Christian soldiers.At Sunday School I sang Onward! to them,just as I'd been taught.
Baby Jesus, Prince of Peace,your birthday tree is a pagan relic. For this season,only its dark underworld scent will do. [End Page 114]
Paulann Peterson, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, is author of six full-length books of poetry: The Wild Awake, Blood-Silk, A Bride of Narrow Escape, Kindle, The Voluptuary, and most recently Understory (Lost Horse Press). A seventh collection, One Small Sun, is forthcoming from Salmon Press. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, the New Republic, Notre Dame Review, Wilderness Magazine, Poetry Daily, and POETRY IN MOTION, which places poems on the Tri-met busses and lightrail cars in the Portland area. The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds chose a poem from her book The Voluptuary as the lyric for a new choral composition that's now part of the repertoire of the Choir at Trinity College Cambridge.
