ADRIENNE RICH
The silence of the year. This hour the streets
Lie empty, and the clash of bells is scattered
Out to the edge of stars. I heard them tell
Morning’s first change and clang the people home
From crèche and scented aisle. Come home, come home,
I heard the bells of Christmas call and die.
This Christmas morning in the stony streets
Of an unaccustomed city, where the gas
Quivers against the darkly shuttered walls,
I walk, my breath a veil upon the cold,
No longer sick for home or hunted down
By faces loved, by gate or sill or tree
That once I used to wreathe in red and silver
Under the splintered incense of the fir.
I think of those inscrutables who toiled,
Heavy and brooding in their camel train,
Across the blue-wrapped stretches: home behind,
Kingdoms departed from, the solemn journey
Their only residence; the starlit hour,
The landscape of the star, their time and place.
O to be one of them, and feel the sway
Of rocking camel through the Judaean sand—
Ride, wrapped in swathes of damask and of silk,
Hear the faint ring of jewel in silver mesh
Starring the silence of the plain, and hold
With rigid fingers curved as in oblation
The golden jar of myrrh against the knees.
To ride thus, bearing gifts to a strange land,
To a strange king, nor think of fear and envy,
Being so bemused by starlight of one star,
The long unbroken journey, that all questions
Sink like the lesser lights behind the hills;
Think neither of the end in sight nor all
That lies behind, but dreamlessly to ride,
Traveller at one with travelled countryside.
How else, since for those Magi and their train
The palaces behind have ceased to be
Home, and the home they travel toward is still
But rumor stoking fear in Herod’s brain?
What else for them but this, since nevermore
Can courts and states receive them as they were,
Nor have the trampled earth, the roof of straw
Received the kings as they are yet to be?
The bells are silent, silenced in my mind
As on the dark. I walk, a foreigner,
Upon this night that calls all travellers home,
The prodigal forgiven, and the breach
Mended for this one feast. Yet all are strange
To their own ends, and their beginnings now
Cannot contain them. Once-familiar speech
Babbles in wayward dialect of a dream.
Our gifts shall bring us home—not to beginnings
Nor always to the destination named
Upon our setting forth. Our gifts compel,
Master our ways, and lead us in the end
Where we are most ourselves, whether at last
To Solomon’s gaze or Sheba’s silken knees
Or winter pastures underneath a star,
Where angels spring like starlight in the trees.
1953