With my fifty-first Christmas coming on,
I’m walking alone in the purple pre-dawn
on the dead white snow of the returned Yukon
winter.
The first plane of the day is up,
dropping bustling thunder on the town,
its flight-lights flashing and diminishing south.
It will be back before the sun goes down.

My fifty-first Christmas under heaven,
walking the self-same slippery, snow-driven
pathways—too old now, to attempt to even
try to believe.
My day’s destinations
are the same ones known and known again—
not Heaven; it’s gone, and is not returning.
But the lights of seem to, sometimes; like pain,

like whatever Christmas, or this morning’s plane.
After two thousand times, we’ve no need to explain
why we’ve waited so long, and so happily, in vain.
The platitude’s wrong:
Hope isn’t eternal;
but at least it’s recurrent, until time wears it down.
My walk has an end, not a destination,
but I have made it, so far, fifty times around.