On the Feast of the Holy Family | poem
A poem from between Christmas and New Year and the feast in between.
On the Feast of the Holy Family
my nephew strains to stand,
testing eight-week-old legs
in the pew to my left.
He can’t focus his eyes yet
but he’ll give standing a go,
as my sister’s strength holds him up,
as we pass him around the tribe.
His Grandad, pew right, watches in delight.
He has spent Christmas holding the boy,
watching him rise and fall
on his belly-tides of inhale and exhale.
He has two new knees now
and he tests them around ponds most days.
And now someone reads Sirach on family,
advice from across the millennia,
‘O Son, help your father in his old age,
and do not mourn him as long as he lives.’
It catches my patterns like good poetry does
and I sit with it and resolve not to
before my niece is back to beam through my blues
and hide in my coat like a stack of cartoon kids.
Teasing is our family's love language
and she got this gene more than most.
She calls spoons ‘boons’ and unicorns ‘unidorns’
and stars ‘how I wonders’.