Tuesday Poem Wednesday: Deacons, Hills

This week and next, some of my favorite holiday words. Today, a bit from Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales--one of the beautifullest things I know. It is my habit to read it aloud nightly in the days leading up to Christmas, staring at Ellen Raskin's sweet wood carvings and fingering the square pages and trying to fit my mouth around the orbs that are all of those wide, yawning vowels.

Years and years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards."

{Photo, Me}