Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, December 19th, 2004. Today's poem is by the late great Donald Hall, and it's called Christmas Eve in Whitneyville. This one is a little longer, too, so I'll read it just once. It also has a little of the melancholy that yesterday's poem featured, but I think Hall does something really remarkable here, and he manages to write a poem about that darkness of the world before Christmas, the sense of hopelessness and helplessness,

the idea of the world being a kind of prison and the darkness falling upon you in the form of that

realization. And then the poem concludes rather expectantly and

pregnantly, just as that dark night turns and gives way to the earliest hours of Christmas

Day. The coming of Christmas Day being something inevitable and outside of our control,

whether the people in the poem

choose it or not. They have made their houses like jails, their lives like jails, and they

cannot get out of them. They will not risk freedom. But perhaps a Christmas Day is coming that will break down those walls from the

outside and usher them into the light anyway. May the same perpetually happen to us all.

Here is Christmas Eve in Whitneyville. December and the closing of the year.

The momentary carolers complete their Christmas eaves and quickly disappear into their houses on each lighted street.

Each car is put away in each garage, each husband home from work to celebrate, has closed his house around him like like a cage and wedged at the tree until the tree stood straight.

Tonight you lie in Whitneyville again. Near where you lived and near the woods or farms which Eli Whitney settled with the men who worked at mass-producing firearms.

The main street, which was nothing after all except a school, a stable, and two stores,

was improvised in individual, picking its way alone among the wars.

Now Whitneyville is like the other places. Ranch houses stretching flat beyond the square.

Same stores and movie, same composite faces speaking the language of the public air.

Old houses of brown shingle still surround this graveyard where you wept when you were ten

and helped to set a coffin in the ground.

You left a friend from school behind you then,

and now return, a man of 52. Talk to the boy. Tell him about the years when Whitneyville quadrupled

and how you and all his friends went on to make careers, had cars as long as hay racks, boardeded planes for Rome or Paris where the pace was slow and

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