Driving To Midnight Mass

Merry Christmas. This is Bono the singer with U2.

This is a poem I'd like to, recite for you by another Irishman, John F. Dean

It's about driving to midnight mass in Dublin on Christmas Eve:

Five-thousand million years ago, this earth lay heaving in a mass of rocks and fire

Wasting, burdened with its emptiness

Tonight, when arthropods and worms and sponges have given way to dinosaurs

And dinosaurs to working, wandering apes

Homo erectus have given way to sapiens, and he to

Homo sapiens sapiens (alias Paddy Mack)

Look down on Dublin from the hills around

And lights could be a million Christmas trees

Still firs standing, while in the sky a glow as if of dawn

This day a light shall shine on us

The Lord is born within our city

Look along to the river toward O'Connell Bridge

The lights, the neon signs, all stream on water like breathed-on strips of tinsel

All is still...

Eleven-thirty, pubs begin to empty

Men stop to argue, sway and say the name of Jesus

For those who have known darkness

Who have now seen a wonderous light

Those who have dwelt on unlit streets

To them the light has come

Tonight, few cars go by

The blocks of flats with windowed-plastic trees

And fairy lights stand, watching for a miracle

Here are no dells where fairies might appear

Out from the dark an ambulance comes speeding

Sickly blue lights search in siren-still

The mystery of the night ticks slowly on

It will pass and leave memories of friends and small, half-welcomed things

In Him was life

In Him, life was the light of man

For neither prehistoric swans nor trilobites, the mesozoic birds

Neanderthal, nor modern man had ever dreamt or seen what was our God

The shops are gay with lights and bright things

All save funeral homes, they dare not advertise their presence

As midnight peels and organs start to play

Two cars meet headlong in a haze of drink

The crash flicks into silence

Pain crawls like a slime through blood and into limbs

God is revealed, a baby naked, crying in a crib

In the church porches and out along the grounds

Teenagers laugh and swear, smokin', watchin' girls

So, once more, Christmas trails away

Its meaning moves back into the mist and the march of time