Sunday, December 25, 2011

Sharing

                              19th Century card; Australia

SHARING

Times may change; this card is quaint.
The child is pictured as a saint
Because she shares her Xmas goods
With a labourer working in the woods!
Yet some things just don't change at all;
Some live in a shack, some up at the Hall.
Let us think, today, of lives that are hard.
And remember this ancient Christmas card.
*

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OLD DAYS, OLD WAYS.

'Ettie Yeo' wrote these words for Christmas
Over a hundred years ago.
She had them printed on Christmas cards
And sent them to people she happened to know.
Ettie-Beatrice was her full name,
The Mother of my Mother-in-law,
And so Great-Grandmother to my children,
But somebody they never saw.
So changed the language and the feeling!
Words like these now don't exist!
But when I read I sort of fancy
That I was on her Christmas List.
She must have hoped that, in her family,
Another poet might emerge.
Well, here I am! No blood-relation,
But, in a way, two lives converge.
*

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