After Christmas

After Christmas

by | Jan 13, 2025 | Poems

This year, twice in the week before Christmas, our outdoor Christmas lights, which are set to go on at dusk, flashed on before ten in the morning and stayed on all day. It has been a dark, damp and cool December. The tension of this time broke as the days of Christmas and the light of the winter solstice entered our consciousness. Christmas arrived. Peace and trust in God’s promises were strengthened.

I have for many years appreciated that this time of Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, is a time of preparing for transformation. As usual, a flurry of shopping and welcome yet distracting parties with friends and family inserted itself into what we had hoped would be quiet times for contemplation, preparing ourselves for the birth and
rebirth of God in us and the world.

This year I was again aware of the yearning in the hearts of people I spoke with who were hoping for this miracle in themselves and in their communities. People spoke of their efforts to surrender their desire for self-control. The hope is that we will surrender what we have wrongly prioritised above our relationship with truth and goodness and our Creator. It is very demanding work to surrender old habits that hold our hearts hostage. It is difficult to clear the space within us and within our communities that takes up the space the new birth will need if it is to be viable. Our hope, our goal, is that our emptiness will be enough to make room for the new birth.

We want the nothing within us to become the gift that is everything. We dearly want our hands to be open to receive this gift.

We fail in many ways to achieve this emptiness. The miracle arrives anyway. It fills us with gladness and hope that we will be able to nurture and protect this new birth. Our awareness that the miracle is gift fills us with awe. We realize we are all in this together. We say yes to the miracle of being given everything.

Part of the Christmas miracle is that we are better able to see ourselves as part of our world in our time. We are not anymore the babies we were at our births. We are grown- up people who can find ways to serve our hurting brothers and sisters who are made in God’s image. We are ready to participate in new ways.

Here are words that came to me as a gift over the past ten years. They fit into the beloved music of Gustave Holtz’s Jupiter from The Planets. The tune is known as Thaxted.

In a few weeks there will be a video on my YouTube Channel: https://www.YouTube.com/@PoemsByChristinaWatkins.

It will be of be this piece: The Speaking of Your Name. It is sung by my friend, Michelle Naidu, who has the voice of an angel.

The Speaking of Your Name
lyrics by Christina Watkins
December 30, 2024

In the sweetness of the morning,
the rhythm of the rain,
lead us in the path of wonder,
the speaking of your name.

Sunlight dances with the shadows
on golden fields and plains.
We learn to love each other
in the speaking of your name.

With brothers and with sisters
we rise and often fall,
on the road and moving forward
in you who make us all.

Clouds gather darkness threatens,
all effort seems in vain,
save courage and your heartbeat,
the speaking of your name.

From darkness until dawning,
through nights of grief and pain
Our hearts embrace love’s wonder
in the speaking of your name.

Living water murmurs wisdom.
Wisdom is of love.
We hope and dream together
below as is above.

The Mexican Jaguar

The Mexican Jaguar

by | Mar 6, 2020 | Poems

Early in our days in Sonora
I went with my husband to a field camp
by jeep. Then bony backed mules.
The eight Mexicans there were shy as
we said Buenos días to each other.
Next morning they answered my Buenos días
with Buenos días le dé Dios.
It became like that.
I stayed in camp all day.
They went out to hammer rocks in
country known as baranca –
place of broken boulders.

My husband and I slept that night
in the small cook shack cabin.
The Mexicans in sleeping bags
circled close round the fire.
Next morning fear was in the camp.

Talk was in rapid nervous Spanish.
We heard gato – cat and pero – dog
and a word we did not know — Onca.
The Mexicans said I must not be left alone.
Our Spanish was not good
in those early days in Mexico.
We thought gato would be a lynx.

That night the Mexicans stayed up late talking.
In the morning the second dog was gone.
In spite of anxious warnings from the Mexicans
I stayed in camp reading by the river.
After lunch — to the relief of the Mexicans —
my husband and I went back to our town
by bony backed mules and jeep.

Years later– in Tucson’s Desert Museum —
we saw a sign saying Onca.
We turned a corner towards it — then
suddenly faced a brown, black and gold
Painted Jaguar —
huge and confident looking.
I felt my full foolishness.

The Mexicans in that long ago camp —
wanted me safe – in spite of myself.
They were my blessing.

Christina Watkins

One Snowy Day in South Porcupine, Ontario, 1975

One Snowy Day in South Porcupine, Ontario, 1975

by | Mar 2, 2020 | Poems

Here is a poem I recently wrote in January. I hope you will enjoy it. It’s called “One Snowy Day in South Porcupine, Ontario, 1975”

I cross country skied in South Porcupine
when eyelashes clumped white from the cold.
At 3 o’clock the babysitter mercifully arrived
and stayed till night began to fall around four.
In colorful breathable light layers of clothes
I skied across the road and field into
woods that stretched all the way up to James Bay.

After a property dispute about sharing toys
I was weary – winter was long.
I skied fast – so lost in the thought that
I failed to notice the snow beginning to fall.
I saw my covered tracks. I was lost.
Light was slant as I skied past trees I didn’t know —
circling – passing the same ones again and again.

Then there was a shift in my vision into light.
Hope sprang up deep and wide.
I hear the sounds of teenagers talking.
As I cried and laughed I skied towards them.

From that road where we lived — after
night had fully fallen — we sometimes
saw the glorious dancing Aurora Borealis,
the northern lights.

Is there something about light dancing
that leads us back to inner times
when light has broken us open?

There is an Opening

There is an Opening

by | Mar 1, 2020 | Poems

Not far from San Sebastian we visited the B&B that was once the hacienda of actor-director John Huston. On the property there were remnants of an abandoned silver mine and remnants of the swimming pool John Huston had built for Elizabeth Taylor who visited there with Richard Burton in the 1960s. I took this photo of the doorway from the exterior to an interior upstairs in the hacienda.

‘There is an Opening’

There is an opening, a door.
When I see it I may pass through
to where the more is more.
Disguises tumble to the floor
uncovering light I’m looking for.