Old Christmas
The celebration of Christmas in the Appalachians according tothe Julian Calendar, on January 6th
The claw, the craw, the red-tailed hawk, dusk-wise,roosting in a bare catalpa tree.Harsh old mountains in January.Matted grass. The body flayedopen like a milkweed pod.The body as muddy pasture.I think I was a field once.My pussy was a cow-smudged creek.A bull lived in me. He liked to sleep.Herds of deer half darknesswavered across me. In winterI froze. In spring I bled wet-weather branches. Water witching.At midnight on Christmas Eve,all the animals in me knelt—coyote, cow, the field micevibrating with fear, the groundhogsomnolent with cold.The Christ Child stirred undermy meadow grass, my cow patties.Half-light threaded the thin treesedging the creek. A warmanimal exhaled body-hot breath.The last stars fell, tinklingand horrific, the sky arced,a chest cavity filled with painand pooling blood, the redflush of suffering under its skin.
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- January 6, 2024
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“Old Christmas” from WHEN GOD WAS A CHILD: by Annie Woodford.
Published by Bull City Press in Fall 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Annie Woodford.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Annie Woodford lives in Deep Gap, North Carolina and is a community college teacher at Wilkes Community College. She is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019). Her second book, Where You Come from Is Gone (2022), is the winner of Mercer University’s 2020 Adrienne Bond Prize and the 2022 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. She was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship in 2019. Her micro-chapbook, When God Was a Child, was published by Bull City Press’s Inch Series (#56) in 2023. She has poems forthcoming in Cutleaf, Appalachian Journal, and Gulf Coast Online Exclusive. Her website is anniewoodfordpoet.com.
The poems in When God Was a Child by poet Annie Woodford explore the rural and mysterious allure of the Appalachian and Piedmont regions of Virginia and North Carolina. Throughout this collection, the beauty and pain of those geographies intersect with the speaker’s personal history as well as broader cultural histories. The landscape and all that inhabit it—the verdant plant life and animals, too—come alive in themselves and in community with each other, all in survival of difficult times, with the fraught and fragile pain and persistence of familial love. As Tayari Jones put it, these poems engage with how “our real human hearts intersect forces that are so much bigger and older than we are.” In the cadence and spirit of fellow North Carolinian poet A.R. Ammon’s work, Woodford’s collection is deeply lyrical and strikingly precise; these are poems that linger.
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