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Anthems sung year on year,
Anthems sung to a god unclear.
Sung by the many in many keys at a time,
Too high for the low and too low for the high.
Sung with passion and sung with joy,
In praise of a thought made flesh in a boy.

Christmas watches in wonder as humans walk the annual mile.
Flock-swarmed and bedazzled they huddle and heave
Into the crumbling church, the tired school hall or the lottery lifted community centre.
What strange force draws them to this wintery convention?
Ignored all year and now the centre of attention!
What invisible hand guides the unfaithful in this annual act of mass hypocrisy?
Maybe these fowl-weather friends of Jesus should be ringed
To discover the mystery of how they manage to migrate to exactly the same spot each year!

The wood- polished brown gloom of the crumbling church resounds to the cacophony of familiar carols.
Grandparents, Croak-backed, crackling- cracked,
“p” in the forte parts and fart in the piano parts.
Watery-eyed they dream as they sing;
Vast vistas of the past evoked,
Sweet memories landscaped, relived then choked.

The shrill confidence of a pale-faced mother of two;
She’s in inner turmoil as she holds a melismatic soaring descant whilst wondering whether she turned the oven off on the mince-pies before she left for the service.
Watery-eyed she dreams as she sings;
Of the infinite kingdom of possibilities,
Over which, one-day, she and her lovelies could claim sovereignty.

Hunched over a mother-keyboard,
The vicar’s son fusses with its litter of little black boxes.
Huge, booming diapason chords of a mighty pipe-organ long since turned to dust
Shake a thousand roof spiders into life and stir the somnolent occupants of the Dripping dark green graveyard outside.
Watery-eyed he dreams as he plays;
Dumped by his darling girl-friend that very day,
He considers the least painful methods of suicide as his tears blur the pied keyboard of his Yamaha.

Carols morphing over generations whistle-back through time,
And present a stratified story with fossilised thoughts of long forgotten gods.
These songs, like the Oolitic-porridged stone-work of our medieval churches
Peppered With fragments of masonry from the ancient past,
Stand as monuments to our culture and are breathed with new life each year when sung.
They proclaim football stadium style, patriotic allegiance to a canon of ineffable beliefs.
A myriad of connections, which network our bit of humanity, threading, weaving and binding us together in a comfort zone of common sensing.

Anthems sung year on year,
Anthems sung to a god unclear.
Sung by the many in many keys at a time,
Too high for the low and too low for the high.
Sung with passion and sung with joy,
In praise of a thought made flesh in a boy.

© David Johnson, December 2008