I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
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Joan Murray is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Swimming for the Ark: New and Selected Poems, 1990–2015. She is the editor of The Pushcart Book of Poetry and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
How can you help remembering it, all of it, when Christmas comes? Christmas is like drowning and seeing your life before your eyes. Every year — and it’s the darkest week of the year — someone strings lights on a tree, and you stand in front of it with whoever or whatever is supposed to make you happy. And you smile, maybe in honest, naked joy, or maybe you fake it because you got an umbrella.