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Poem Of The Week: December 24th By Sue Vickerman

December 24th

It is almost five. It is Heiligabend.
The forecast shows snow cartwheeling over Saarland.
The sun goes down on your cul-de-sac,
on your parents’ small, well-tended garden.

Your yard is swept. Your steps are gritted.
Your mother’s broom rests in an apple tree’s elbow.
She hurries outdoors at the very last minute
to dead-head a rose.

Your father is on the point of lighting
the candles on a tree dug out of the Saar basin,
which, from the plane, glittered
like a Christmas card.

You have always told me how the waiting
was hard; was the best thing of all: how,
when the bells finally toll across the valley,
the whole village feels holy.

Sue Vickerman’s fine, precisely-paced, meditation invests her scene on a German Christmas Eve with a kind of magic realism. Surprised, like Larkin’s agnostic, by an infusion of spirituality in the wider European landscape of the secular and the commercial, Vickerman’s narrator finds a rare, inviolate solemnity that might, as much as it is no less illusory than the flight of a snowman, be an indicator of human need.

‘December 24th’ is measured like a processional. Stopping to pause or reflect on the season in the glittering light of its locators – the neat garden, the broom resting in the crook of an apple tree, a Christmas tree whose provenance is nailed as resolutely as the calendar’s date – Vickerman makes a metonym for hope out of the reified lucency of local detail.

The backward glance to an airborne journey over the Saarland lends depth to the poem’s perspective, confirming the serendipity of forecasts and yielding a winter map that is as fulsome as it is storied, like the impression of a boot in pristine snow. But there is silence too: the lines of the four simple quatrains are whispered, muffled against the intrusion of retail and the synthetic. The gathering, the joining of hands, is anticipated by the presence of loved ones in the scene, expectant and as brimming with possibility as the pealing of distant bells over valleys. The conjunction yields a sense of hope in ritual observance, and an oasis of quiet in a world terminally afflicted by sound and fury. Sue Vickerman’s final lines are charged with a sense of the spiritual that is corollary to belonging.

A very merry Christmas to all of our readers!

‘December 24th’ is taken from Adventus, published by Naked Eye (2017).

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