was without Christmas
spirit – the world that used to
nurse us keeps shouting
I was without Christmas spirit
so I made three cow dogs,
Lola and Blacky and Pinto,
cheeseburgers with ground chuck
and French St. André cheese
so that we’d all feel better.
I delivered them to Hard Luck Ranch
and said, “Chew each bite 32 times.”
They ignored me and gobbled.
The world that used to nurse us
now keeps shouting inane instructions.
That’s why I ran to the woods.
Xmas Cheeseburgers by Jim Harrison in Songs of Unreason as published in the Complete Poems of Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA 2021).
The world that used to nurse us
now keeps shouting inane instructions.
That’s why I ran to the woods.
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
The bell struck twelve.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Chapman and Hall: London, 1843).
