Good morning Christmas
Half a century ago, and more, of a Christmas morning,
we would walk out, my brother John and me, and climb the mountain.
No cars on the road and certainly none to be heard or seen.
Below us Prestatyn town slumbered, quiet and for once serene.
In the 1950s, there were few private cars any day;
if people travelled at all it would be by bus or railway.
In the turmoil of now, streets never cease their hectic motion -
spilling out even into this one day of mute reflection.
When I lived in France, HGVs were banned from roads on Sundays.
I don’t know if still they are. But couldn’t we give towns car-free days?
Where I live now, in north-west Scotland, there are the silences
enfolding themselves around me which quell all other senses
allowing suppressed natural sounds to eke into consciousness.
The triumph of days (and nights) drifting sublimely machine-less,
giving up the sound stage to chuckling water and wind-brushed trees;
our Neanderthal forebears heard, as us, the stream and the breeze,
Yet they knew nothing of us and even less of our Christmas.
But these primeval sounds connect us to them and sustain us,
in contradistinction to the thunderclaps which shake the earth
and the lightning strikes which cleave the mother in her act of birth.
But Gaia - Mother Earth - does most of her business in a dream.
It is her animal tenants which yell, shriek, howl, cry and scream.
On Christmas morning today I go out again in Highland
dreams to savour a silence with some nostalgia yet still grand.
© RM Meyer
The Highlands, December 2021, January 2022