Two Poems
Michael R. Burch
The First Christmas
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​’Twas in a land so long ago . . .
the lambs lay blanketed in snow
and little children everywhere
sat and watched warm embers glow
and dreamed (of what, we do not know).
And THEN—a star appeared on high,
The brightest man had ever seen!
It made the children whisper low
in puzzled awe (what did it mean?).
It made the wooly lambkins cry.
Not far away a new-born lay,
warm-blanketed in straw and hay,
a lowly manger for his crib.
The cattle mooed, distraught and low,
to see the child. They did not know
it now was Christmas day!
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Mike’s notes: “‘The First Christmas’ is one of my gentler poems, almost a lullaby. I was not a Christian by the time I wrote it, but I do like the idea of the Trinity as a human family: mother, father and child, with every child being the Christ child. And who knows, perhaps each child has a special star, a guiding light, a guardian Angel. The poem was cited in ‘Vocabulary Richness in English Poetry’ by Contemporary Literature Press and has been published by TALESetc, Core Virtues, Casa de Serra, Fullosia Press and RPW Writers.“
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Late Frost
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​The matters of the world like sighs intrude;
out of the darkness, windswept winter light
too frail to solve the puzzle of night’s terror
resolves the distant stars to salts: not white,
but gray, dissolving in the frigid darkness.
I stoke cooled flames and stand, perhaps revealed
as equally as gray, a faded hardness
too malleable with time to be annealed.
Light sprinkles through dull flakes, devoid of color;
which matters not. I did not think to find
a star like Bethlehem’s. I turn my collar
to trudge outside for cordwood. There, outlined
within the doorway’s arch, I see the tree
that holds its boughs aloft, as if to show
they harbor neither love, nor enmity,
but only stars: insignias I know—
false ornaments that flash, overt and bright,
but do not warm and do not really glow,
and yet somehow bring comfort, soft delight:
a rainbow glistens on new-fallen snow.​​
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Mike’s notes: “I had Robert Frost in mind when I wrote this poem, and thus the title. Frost was fond of the word ‘arch,’ and it’s here because of that fondness. The poem imagines him as an old man and a skeptic, but one who never really made a complete break from his childhood faith. The rainbow created by the ‘artificial stars’ was not something I had planned… in fact, I believe I wrote that line before I understood that the Christmas tree ornaments were creating the rainbow.”
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Michael R. Burch is one of the world’s most-published poets, with over 11,500 publications, including poems that have gone viral. This does not include self-published writings; if self-published writings were included, Mike’s total publications would be well over 20,000. Mike has also had 74 poems set to music by composers, from swamp blues to classical. He is also a longtime editor, publisher, and translator of Jewish Holocaust poetry and poems about the Trail of Tears, Hiroshima, Ukraine, the Nakba, and school shootings. Mike’s full biography may be read here.
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