If we are aware that the holidays , like life, are often more messy than magical, and if we can combine our childlike longings with the tenderness and power of our adult selves, then we are more likely to ride through this season with a measure of grace in our lives and ease in our bodies.

13 Dec 2022 Leave a comment

by jeannepoland in Poetry

Sometimes Christmas looks like this in Genoa:

Geneen Roth On 12/13/22

Italian Couple Exposed in Photo-Booth Tryst
by David Citino


Caught in flagrante, stowing away

in steerage, a do-it-yourself love boat.

Privacy is hard to come by. Lovers

need to find new ways to say So long.

They had an hour before his sad train

withdrew from the terminal,

leaving her unsatisfied in the way

only one left bereft on the brink can be.

They’d have gotten away with it

had their passion not pounded, rocked

the booth, shaking the curtain, two actors

fumbling for the same grand entrance,

as tourists and commuters thronging

n the Genoa train station swelled

to an audience outside the hot-flashing

Bower of Bliss. We can’t be content

with the art of being human in the dark,

our grand dance. We need to make

acts of art of the very acts of life,

so that later—in the tranquility

we’re doomed as humans to undergo

for long spells, or briefly every now

and then—we can know what it is

not to be silent, cold, alone.

“Italian Couple Exposed in Photo-Booth Tryst” by David Citino, from The Invention of Secrecy. © Ohio State University Press, 2001. Reprinted with permission.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2022


“I invite you to pray, before the creche, that the Nativity of the Lord will bring a ray of peace to children all over the world, especially those forced to live the terrible and dark days of war, this war in Ukraine that destroys many lives, so many lives, and many children.” 

Pope Francis
 

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