Christmas2016 Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 1958 poem, "Christ Came Down," Valley Friends Meeting
Channel: BleuZ00m
Date: 2023-12-15

Christmas 2016: Valley Friends Meeting, in Wayne PA, hosted a holiday read-aloud gathering. Here, Meeting member Graham Dawson reads Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 1958 poem, "Christ Came Down." This poem calls out the commercialization of modern day Christmas and what it has become. It serves to remind us what this holiday can be about, instead. It is not a children's story; this is for adults. 

Christ Climbed Down by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
______________________________________
Christ Climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candy canes and breakable stars

Christ Climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powder blue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives

Christ Climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesman
covered the territory
in two-tone Cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody’s imagined Christ child

Christ Climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby Carolers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ Climbed Down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings.

Copyright 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from "A Coney Island of the Mind." 
_____________________________________________

"...The Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 satellite had just fallen back to earth. United States government officials were conducting a series of extensive nuclear weapons tests in what was code-named Operation Argus. Meanwhile, a little known group called the John Birch Society was starting to gain power across the country.

It was 1958, and New York-born poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti would publish one of his most famed books entitled A Coney Island of the Mind, with the holiday-themed poem “Christ Climbed Down.” Ferlinghetti’s book received a harsh and sometimes violent backlash from various civic groups at the time, accusing the poet of being a Communist for his stands against totalitarianism and war. Ferlinghetti co-founded the San Francisco-based City Lights Bookstore in the early 1950s, and eventually published poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac, both of whom were close friends with Denver notable Neal Cassady, an icon of the Beat Generation..." 

(c) 2007 Colorado Independent
link: https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2007/12/24/seasonal-poetry-christ-climbed-down/