Open the Paper Window
Open the paper window –
there’s whisky, repatriated from duty-free.
A little ankle bracelet –
Mhairi where are you now?
A crouching platoon, months under the double bed,
a lick-down mine.
Open the paper window – snow! the only white Christmas –
four brothers – wool bales – piled low on the hurtling sledge.
Scaletrix. A red car, a green car –
they’re from my father to my father.
We were just intermediaries.
It seems repetitive to mention the train set,
but later you could hide hash in the papier-maché tunnel.
Open the window. It counts against me
I can remember not a single present my mother received.
Open the window – a bit of peace and quiet from you shower
or there’ll be no Christmas this year!
Open the window – a tangerine,
miraculous, the orange for learners.
A tall candle, E-type red, has melted the pewter candlestick.
There’s a brown-and-green black-and-white tv,
call it television please.
Bells and mirrors for a baby thirty-five years ago.
Bells and mirrors for a baby ten years ago.
Thomas Hardy, cheer us up!
Open the paper window –
Mum and Dad are going to Midnight Mass.
(You’re in trouble – you were seen enjoying yourself
at Midnight Mass.)
How does Father Christmas fill the stocking?
We stayed awake as long as we could!
Open the window –
glowing pastels.
Open the window –
tinsel.
Open the window.
Try not to electrocute yourself this time! They aren’t sweeties!
Black bags of exhausted wrapping.
She definitely said batteries included.
For the nineteenth time you’re not getting a gun
for bloody Christmas!
Open the window.
Too much brandy butter.
Open the window, the last paper window
(it’s quiet here, under the tree) –
the present: abstract, perfect,
waiting to be opened.
Because each stanza is about a completely different experience the form of this
poem is ideal for group work: a class or book group
could make their own poetry Advent Calendar in this way.
The poem is
taken from Greenfields, published by Carcanet.
All texts unless otherwise stated are ©
Richard Price
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