Tuesday, May 28, 2013

On A Box of Christmas Decorations, Seen in Summer

In the corner of the cupboard lies
A cardboard box of Christmas things.
Huddled as not to scandalize
The summer time, it hides its joys
Until the carol singer sings.

How sad, how sweetly sad it seems!
How far away seems Christmas now!
These trinkets are an old man’s dreams
Of boyhood, or a boy’s glimpsed gleams
Of what his future might allow.

What is so achingly, shyly tender
As the dark vigil these baubles keep?
Sad as the melting snow’s surrender
Or the submission a child’s eyes render
To the triumphant tyrant, sleep.

It seems like a legend, an idle story
That ever there was a Christmas Day.
These tinsel treaures that glitter before me;
The thought of them raised again in glory
Seems so impossibly far away.

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