Sherry Chandler

should be honored. Here’s one from Spain, courtesy of AP by way of the Lexington Herald-Leader:

BARCELONA, Spain - The Virgin Mary. The three kings. A few wayward sheep. These are the figures one expects to find in a traditional Christmas nativity scene. Not a smartly dressed peasant squatting behind a rock with his rear-end exposed.

Yet statuettes of “El Caganer,” or the great defecator in the Catalan language, can be found in nativity scenes, and increasingly on the mantelpieces of collectors, throughout Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region, where for centuries symbols of defecation have played an important role in Christmas festivities.

During the holiday season, pastry shops around Catalonia sell sweets shaped like feces, and on Christmas Eve Catalan children beat a hollow log, called the tio, packed with holiday gifts, singing a song that urges it to defecate presents out the other end.

These traditions, in the case of the caganer dating back as far as the 17th century, come from an agricultural society where defecation was associated with fertility and health.

While the traditional caganer is a red-capped peasant, more modern renditions have gained popularity in recent years.

It’s the solstice, which really is the reason for the season, longest night of the year. And if we build our campfires high, fill our houses with twinkling lights and evergreen, maybe we can entice the Sun back for another year. We have reason to hope. It’s always worked before.

Let us also hope, however, that Sol doesn’t come back too strong, given Global Warming.

To mark the day, I give you this poem I wrote in 1995. It was originally published in Pegasus, Fall/Winter 1998.

Ode to Gray Skies

It’s the dark time
      and I am become a connoisseur of overcast
      a scholar of achromotology
The sky is filled with water,
      emptied of color,
      yet it is not dull.
It has only brightness
      embodied in the mass of cloud
      that modulates in shades of gray
            from battleship to dove
            from slate to pearl.

It’s the dark time,
      at dawn the sun makes no show,
      the birds sing no aubade
In the west, the Wolf Moon
      wrapped like a gypsy in a gray shawl,
      keeps silent, her feral tales untold.
The cattle, black and still
      under the white mist of their breath,
      do not browse afield.
They wait, rumps windward,
      for the dry yellow grass
      that smells of summer.

It’s the dark time.
      Persephone is underground
      and death is over all the earth.
I do not love the earth tones,
      the dead-grass brown,
      the bare-tree gray.
The earth is filled with color;
      it is emptied of light.
I watch only the sky.
Its deeps of cloud,
      backlit, opalescent,
      hold a promise of the sun.

Mick Kennedy writes to remind us that the postmark deadline for Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize entries is January 10, 2007. Guidelines here.

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The National Federation of State Poetry Societies has posted guidelines for their 2007 College/University Level Poetry Awards. Entries must be mailed after January 1 and received before February 1. Guidelines here.

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Deadline for the Kudzu Poetry Prize is February 1. Guidelines posted here