In Minnesota long ago,
Before the ice age passed away,
When all the earth was cold and snow,
I was a child on Christmas Day.

Our mother made the whole house warm
With cookied oven, stockinged hearth.
Outside, the north wind blew and stormed,
But inside, we were warm with mirth.

Each corner hung with holly boughs,
The tree a starlit cone upright.
With tinsel Mom would teach us how:
From single strands, a shower of light.

A town on a table was Mom’s chef d’oeuvre,
With cotton mounds as hills of snow.
Small skiers, sledders slid and swerved,
Onto a mirrored lake below.

On Christmas Eve, Mom sat and played
The carols she taught us all to sing:
“I saw three ships … on Christmas Day,”
“Lo, how a rose!” and “We three kings.”

Once, Santa Claus himself paid visit.
As oldest child, I was suspicious:
“Truck or Nick, which uncle is it?
And how does he know my secret wishes?”

I lay awake that night, intent
On hearing a far-off ho-ho-ho.
Later, I knew this must have meant
That Dad had shivered in the snow.

On Christmas morning on the stairs
We formed a line in age descending
And sang a verse in lieu of prayers
Of “Hark, the herald angels sing!”

But halfway down, the young broke ranks
And made a dash for the treasure pile.
To Mom and Dad we owe our thanks
For greeting such chaos with their smiles.

Later that day, we loaded the car
And drove halfway around the lake
To the Hermitage, where Ammie’s heart
Was filled with joy for Jesus’ sake.

On her piano stood the creche
That I’d help set up two weeks before.
I felt deep down my dearest wish
That I might stand there evermore

Beside the crackling fire that blazed
In Ammie’s kindly living room.
With Grampa she sat as if amazed
At what their love had made to bloom.

I knew that they both loved the Lord,
As much as anyone I knew.
As little baby, mighty Word,
They knew that he alone was true.

Their lessons lasted; they grew old;
And our dear Grampa passed away.
But Ammie’s faith was ever bold
Right to and through her dying day.

Now sixty years have flown and gone.
She has joined Grampa in the sky.
Our Mom and Dad themselves passed on.
Even the Hermitage is long gone by.

But Jesus Christ still waits for us
In manger poor, on altar raised.
Each Christmas I will raise a chorus
To honor the Lord that they all praised.

I have been thinking about writing a personal memoir (mine) in verse; and reading this poem, I realized that it contains many important movements:

• Being sown in the upper Midwest, where farming was an important backdrop to both branches of my family

• The goodness and generosity, the prodigality even, of the sowers in my story, mainly parents and grandparents

• The “blizzard” of my midlife, in which I “misspent” so much of this seed

• The blessing of the seed’s “vernalization,” its dormancy during “forty years in the wilderness”

• Its “breaking soil” with my return to Christian worship as a Catholic in 2007

• My debt to forebears for “the things I am today”

• Sadness over the rising generation, which knows no “analog land,” only a virtual reality offered by “screens that would kill them”

Here’s the poem again:

Winter Wheat

It’s primal, not to see the seed
whose sowing set my feet
in acreage on which today
I stand, speak, sway.
It fell before I had my sight.
I was sown and grown at night.

A summer child of ’51,
I came to life upon
the farms of my fathers, fed by wheat
sown prodigally at their feet:
seeds of family, faith, fortune,
and prayer, more than my portion.

This seed sustained a field scoured
by blizzard, misspent hours.
Its winter-long germination
stayed my ruination.
Long to vernalize, in ’07
it broke soil for heaven.

The things I am today all owe
their being here to those
who gave me good ground and sowed it,
fed, watered, hoed it,
toiling a generation to raise
a crop not crazed.

What distant famine awaits us all
from sown fields virtual—
no analog land, no seed,
just pixels of greed
disseminated to our children
by screens that would kill them?

Our small town on the south shore of Lake Minnetonka to the west of Minneapolis really was called Deephaven.

Today, August 29, is my parents’ 75th wedding anniversary. My previous post honors my mother, and so I think this is a good companion piece.

There’s a monk in my marriage,
arrived without word
and moves about free
in a household of three.
This may sound awkward,
I admit, but we manage.

With the children gone
our productive years passed,
there’s a void between floors,
which nature abhors:
an empty space vast
into which he has come.

Most days he hangs out
in my chapel downstairs
with the prayer books and beads.
We chant rosaries
in antiphonal pairs.
I alone hear the sound

of his “Holy Marys”
and his “as it was
in the beginnings.”
Faith and peace are my winnings,
whatever he does:
pray, sing, praise—it varies.

He nudges me nights
to rouse me from sleep
and prompt me to prayer.
My wife’s unaware,
her slumber so deep
that she never takes fright

at my absence from bed.
When, two hours on,
I slip in beside her,
she sometimes will stir
and ask, You OK, hon?
I kiss her sweet head.

My sole vow is wedded,
to her, not to him.
He’s on a short leash;
he knows this at least.
If love ever dimmed,
out the door he’d be headed.

For now, he affords
me to live a split life:
monastic alone
yet married in home.
I love my dear wife
and adore the Lord.

On the edge of my yard
where the hedge meets stone wall
stands a tree looking south.
It is old, and it’s scarred
but unlikely to fall
or succumb to the drought
that dries all.

It is fed below ground
by a stream no one sees,
its roots reaching far.
Through its boughs comes the sound
of warm wind across leaves
from the most distant star,
I believe.

I admire that tree:
while I dig and I pull
at the weeds, while I toil,
it has only to be,
standing tall, branches full
of lush fruit. It’s with joy
that I mull—

Were that tree me, I’d pray
that my daughter appear,
by dawn’s glint drawn to me.
Just one apple, God say,
she would pluck midst my tears,
and one bite set her free
from all fears.

Where is the boy turned to the light,
who asked hard questions every night?
I cannot find him anywhere.
I search my mind: he is not there.
I search my heart: I’ve lost the fear
that once ran deep to know that there
was once a time without my I.
An earth without me: how and why?

Instead, today I call to mind
the thought that once there was no time,
no earth, no light, no mighty wind—
that all of this came true through Him.
Before the start of history
was something greater: Mystery.