Christmas Eve

There’s nothing to do but listen
so you know where the sound begins.
Not the same anywhere but in your head,
where lights crawl off to pick up their shadows.
The Gospel according to Matthew is
gliding across the screen this Christmas Eve.

What if Pasolini rose from his grave?
Would he confess, I am a heretic,
or more likely, upbraid clergy for sloth . . .
I remember the first time I saw it
the film refused to go on long enough
to lose its tempo, Odetta singing
Motherless Child, Prokofiev’s Nevsky
orchestrated for Sergei Eisenstein.
Who believed this Jesus Christ was Marxist
would discover no prophet lived alone
when freeing the poor was heroic work.

Among the defeated, the abandoned, 
came one bent on poetry, cinema,
mythology’s reality stripping 
history’s shame down to mourning’s absence.
He was mauled, murdered by his young lovers.
For Pasolini no resurrection.
His boys did not trouble to bury him.

(24 December 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander