'It Was a Caricature of Bethlehem'

“Christmas in Poland is a quintessentially domestic holiday. It is always celebrated at home. Christmas Eve is its climactic moment. Homes and apartments are transformed into strongholds of familial egotism -- family love, if you’d rather. The lonely must undergo true miseries unless they’re invited to someone else’s home.” 

For several years we’ve watched from a distance as a homeless woman moved around an intersection near our neighborhood. Sometimes she would camp on the ramp leading to the branch library. She might move under the awning in front of the credit union or to the corner next to a light pole. She pushed a shopping cart fitted with a large opened umbrella and overflowing with plastic shopping bags. Lately she seemed to have acquired more possessions, claimed more turf and become more stationary. Not long ago I saw her seated at the corner on the sidewalk surrounded by her bags, a sort of instinctive homestead. Last week the cops took her away, probably because on the opposite corner is an elementary school and parents complained.    

 

“Krakow was deserted. By seven in the evening, the city was vacant. The Market Square, which teems with people every other day -- and night -- was black, a wasteland. A wartime atmosphere, as though curfew had fallen.”

 

Houstonians, unaccustomed to temperatures in the twenties, huddled at home like paleolithic family groups. With little traffic, the city was unnaturally quiet. The front garden has wilted in the cold. Less than two weeks ago, monarchs were still flitting about. No kids are outside playing in our cul-de-sac, usually as crowded as a playground at recess.

 

“Beyond the windows Polish families feasted, indifferent to the fates of those outside. We sat for a moment at one of the improvised tables; it wasn’t cold. Tourists all around, devouring their roasted meat from plastic plates. Honey-colored dabs of mustard on white trays. It was an oasis. It was a caricature of Bethlehem, that lighted space beneath a wooden roof. I told M. that you could write a play trying to capture something from that moment. A silent city and the hushed chatter of tourists. So write it. But I won’t.”

 

[The passages quoted above are excerpted from the late Adam Zagajewski’s “Dangerous Considerations: A Notebook,” published in the October 2007 issue of Poetry.]