Christmas Feeling

By Kristina Klein (~2013)

One young year I dreamt a dream

That I should wake and it should seem

That Santa never did exist

And that old feeling won’t persist.

Then I woke to find the dream

Was just a dream, and cannot mean

That all my glee had dissipated  

And young splendor all but wasted.

But one year passed and that dull dread

Began to weave its strangling thread.

Once present just in unreal night thoughts

Now lingering in the morning sunspots.

Tucked in my bed I lay and I think

About the joy disappeared in only a wink

The wink of a year, in a cynical world

Draining its children of emotions deserved.

In the next room wafted the smell of the pine

The presents stacked low, but so ribboned and fine.

What could I do but to rise and to face

The corpses of Christmas, the dull Christmas haze.

The stomach butterflies’ wings have been dampened,

Through time, age, thoughts, they’ve been hampered.

Stocking is empty, tree lights shorting out

For the first time the question, what loss is about.

Not loss of a family, a trinket, or love,

But loss of emotion, a memory wove

Into all that I thought and felt to be true

It’s not what I thought, and I’ll have to start new.

Magnanimous emotion, the size of ocean waves

Evaporated into mist that can’t be grasped or saved.

But then, what’s this, another strange thing

Injected into my heart, to sing sing sing.

A new feeling: the feelings of adults, 

not light but all the same

Fulfilling inside cravings for that stirring 

too important to be named.