‘December Oak Leaves’: An Advent Poem by Louis Groarke

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December Oak Leaves

Puis çà, puis là, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charrie,
(The wind, gleefully, pushing us, changing its mind,
Forwards and backwards, all of the time.)

—François Villon, “La Ballade des pendus”
(“The Ballad of the Hanged Men”)

The oak leaves are the last to go;
They hang from branches in the snow.
In tempest tossed, they feckless swing
And flap forlorn like dead bird-wings.

Like Villon’s dead men in a row,
These lifeless leaves blow to and fro;
To icy twigs they hopeless cling,
Their fingers frozen as they swing.

Hung out to dry, in winter’s noose,
They dangle there, now pried half-loose.
Like shingles on a tattered shed,
They clatter loudly overhead.

Up high, above these frozen lands,
Leaves clap together like dead hands.
As evening solstice marks the time,
The wind, indifferent, plays these chimes.

Brave bundled strangers trundle by
In heavy coats and wonder why.
An old man asks where summer’s gone,
The highway traffic scurries on.

Through winter’s frozen charnel house,
The coyote stalks the famished grouse.
The pond ice breaks like broken bones,
Beneath the ground, seeds sleep like stones.

An Advent song, in minor key,
Weaves faintly through the sleeping trees.
No promise here of distant spring
That time unfolding may yet bring.

But ages past, in dead of night,
In straw and cold and firelight,
From linen flesh, unfurrowed fields,
A swaddled babe, the Godhead yields.

The baby born in sudden haste;
A ravished bride, completely chaste.
In barnyard straw by humble beasts,
The Most is born the very least.

Where men were ruled by Roman sword,
The midwife cuts the fresh red cord.
Old Herod hails the bloody birth
As God bends o’er the brooding earth.

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Louis Groarke is a professor in the Philosphy Department of St. Francis Xavier University, in Canada. He has published short stories and poems in various literary venues but is a philosopher by trade.  He recently published a book on literary criticism Uttering the Unutterable: Aristotle, Religion, and Literature (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023).  In effect, it provides a traditional response to post-modernism.