Terence Degnan
Reflections on Your 9th Birthday
I can remember the day
you came home
and broke us the news about
Jolly Old Saint Nick
with no tears in your eyes
no betrayal on your tongue
you had already worked it out
all day you imagined us
sneaking around the winter months
building up the narrative
worrying over
the many thresholds of truth
you’d have to cross in your youth
I remember
cursing the name of that little boy
who couldn’t shoulder the burden on his own
and every time I catch you now
spinning a Christmas yarn
to a classmate in the dark
I feel the pangs of fatherhood
and the pride that comes
from tiny moral victories
from the smallest in your tribe
it wasn’t like the day you found
an old copy of The Diary of Anne Frank
your mother once read
in grade school
the questions were more profound then
Anne’s shoes were far bigger to step into
I had prepared myself
for the Christmas Inquisition
but not Anne’s specific holocaust
which isn’t to say we didn’t have instructions
taped to our window
written in Spanish
detailing the many ways
our neighbors could escape
the threat of being rounded up
and placed in concentration camps
where they would be instructed
to drink from a toilet
where some of them would meet
a similar fate as Anne’s
I had yet to tie the bow
that connects the present
to the past
you hadn’t tasted coffee yet
or anything much harder
your heart was still an unbruised fruit
it had yet to be ignored by the object
of an unrequited crush
but I can vividly recount the look on your face
you gave when you turned the book around
to see Anne’s photograph
where just a few feet away
one of yours was framed
by magnets on the kitchen fridge
the human world is bound to joy and cruelty
maybe they grow specifically
by the existence of one another
I won’t be the last to tell you
that one far outpaces the former
in the timeline of your race
more often than not
it takes more years to die
than it does to pull off a storybook wedding
last kisses are practiced in many hospitals
and they bear more gravity than any firsts
but they’re not mutually exclusive
they’re kisses, after all
and they are planted for a few years
every day at drop off
until they are pushed away
but the planting bears the gravitas
the word itself means to sow hope
in a fertile place
for every plot of ruination
there’s a sliver to fit a camel through
there’s a trap door below the other one
and an ally dressed up like an executioner
what I’m trying to tell you is that
Santa Claus is real
he’s got a beard and all
and wears hiking boots
he visits children in the desert
and every night he leaves them small packages
filled with sandwiches
and a gallon of water
the days he spends locked up for it are long
but he does it because someone once
kissed him in the morning
every day before the school bell rang
before he had a beard and all
someone sowed some hope with that
so when people ask me
how I could ever bring another kid
into a forsaken future
I look to you and think
Anne still needs an attic
some kid is still waking up today
and needs one more gallon of water
to finish her trek across
a barren, foreign desert
the human world is wed to hope and cruelty
good deeds, especially
are flogged for f***ing up a plot
what I’m saying is, be a ruiner
plant kisses on your own daughters
even though the suffering is vast
most of the time it takes longer to die
than it does
to blow out
nine candles on a birthday cake
but every day, someone turns nine
and they are invisibly surrounded by
the folks that made it possible
and what I’m saying is:
be them
Terence Degnan is the author of Still Something Rattles (Sock Monkey Press, 2016) and The Small Plot Beside the Ventriloquist’s Grave (Sock Monkey Press, 2012). His poems have appeared recently in the journal The New Southerner and in the anthology Resist Much/Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), edited by tudied poetry at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a Martin Luther King Jr. Poetry Prize. Degnan co-hosts the monthly poetry series “Poets Settlement” in Brooklyn. In 2014, he started the monthly storytelling series entitled “How to Build a Fire” at Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn. Degnan leads a writing workshop with poet Jen Fitzgerald. Terence lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. Online at terencedegnan.com
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