Dear John:
I just played your Christmas song,
first your peace version
recorded with Yoko in Montreal,
then the unofficial one with snowy landscapes,
fire lit hearths,
joyful faces,
and one soldier, grey faced, alone,
walking in a war zone...
So this is Christmas 2015:
same carousel,
old and new wars right here at home,
recharged guns,
and children dying in the deranged streets.
And nights silent in snowdrifts
under a single star,
bullets, and promises broken in Bethlehem.
But then I hear your voice,
nasal, plaintive,
backed by a chorus of kids
in your hopeful anthem.
It echoes in my brain,
refuses to let go.
And hope,
that thing that flies
once it breaks away,
soars on a stubborn string,
senseless, sublime.
And candles, lit one by one,
mark the passing nights,
flicker in the dark.
Dear John,
your plainsong lives on.
Can it be forty years
since you asked us to imagine?
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Carolyn Pettit Pinet was born in South Wales and grew up in Oxfordshire, England. She is winner of an Allen Ginsberg Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from King’s College, London University in 1973 and taught in the Department of Modern Languages at Montana State University from 1981 to 2011. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.
