Silent Night is an acceptance poem, a celebration of and a reflection on being small and finding that together, everything is better.

Silent Night – an Acceptance Poem

Some days we are a silent night. Listen. This is when stars smell like
morning dew glossing over the stones and the moss

you lay aside when burying tulip bulbs in the garden. You’re not one to
discard. The worms go into your wormery and the bugs

you let fly. From the kitchen window, I hear your knees bedding on the
muck and smell your soiled skin, I see you blowing the seeds of weeds

onto the patch the dog dug up, God knows what she’d thought she’d
find, poor fool like me, intermittently dead sure the bone is but

inches further down the muscle, she forgets about the light-years
between the plough and the falling star. You pile the dug out rocks

into a small wall around the sprouts, raindrops mother yellows and
purples and blues and whites, lighter than the homestead clouds

the silent night has brought to her bosom, next to the swallows and
right beside the nape of my neck. On her lap, gasps churn out

giggles because they can soar above the clattering pots where
your or I crush garlic for breakfast when we could be

making hay but cows don’t only need dried grass,
my grandfather used to say as he sifted the cream off the top

for me and my brothers and sisters to have with biscuits for supper
on balmy nights during the summer holidays. That is how I know

the milky way. Sometimes, someone is like a meteor shower when
you meet them, a new stellar constellation forms and

your likes will never be the same again now that we are shadowing
the morning star, brooding on the clearing and on the ways

songbirds pitch in the black. Look. This tweet is an old oak tree,
these chirps mould a hot spring and this peck bows minutes and days

between us, if we care to stop and listen to the flowers grow taller than
any woman, man or child toward the looping sun, now lines curve

and run into circles, tiny spheres and orbs the size of an ocean
bend icicles. And their drops fall into the face of the spring crocus.