Christmas

One needn’t be Christian
To rejoice in the celebration
That marries the birth of a savior
With pagan rites and trees
And circles of green.

No doctrine can fully separate
The Yuletide feast
From eight flickering eyes
Watching at no great distance--
Or from other bright dots on the calendar
Named by tongues all foreign to each other.

No single creed can own
The arrival of the eternal,
And its light to human eyes,
And its confounding
Of the limits
That human understanding
Would seek to impose.

December the twenty-fifth
Is both less and more
Than the pious preach,
The godless gull,
And the hopeful heed.

It is the Nativity.