This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
Before the Capitol riot of 2021, January 6th was best known—particularly within Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and other Western churches—as the Feast of the Epiphany, or “Three Kings Day,” which celebrates the “light” of Jesus revealed to the world. In popular culture, others may know January 6th as take-down-your-Christmas-tree day.
In today’s poem, “Feast of the Epiphany,” Julia Spicher Kasdorf focuses on the epiphanies she encountered while growing up outside Manor, Pennsylvania.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published five books of poetry, most recently As Is, in the Pitt Poetry Series. She is currently at work on a documentary poetry project about agricultural activity within about 30 miles of her home in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. She directs the Creative Writing program at Penn State.
In her poem “Feast of the Epiphany,” Julia Spicher Kasdorf takes us back to her childhood and “a small town in Westmoreland County along the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad between the modern-day Amtrak station stops of Greensburg and Pittsburgh.” Here, a community, gathering to burn Christmas trees, both lights and transforms the faces of volunteer firemen and children.
Here’s “Feast of the Epiphany” by Julia Spicher Kasdorf
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That town along the tracks where trains no longer stopped
had more bars than churches, but everyone kept Christmas
so on January 6th, a day most of us could not name,
volunteer firemen gathered at the playground to burn trees,
our own and those we begged from old neighbors. A branch
in each mittened hand, we’d drag them through the streets
to the place where men in helmets and thick, complicated coats
bent to bestow one new year’s dime for each brittle pine
they’d receive and hurl into the blaze. Now we might ask where
the mothers were—home, fixing dinner, fathers on the road—
but have I told this well enough for you to hear the conflagration,
hot and loud as a locomotive, for you to see the sparks spray
in great arrays against the night? There could have been a war
somewhere or mills closing, but those men—faces painted
with flames—did not resemble neighbors or uncles of school mates
that night. Walking, cold and tired, into the rest of winter,
a child could be light with dimes and lead tinsel in her pocket,
pine needles splintered in her snow boots’ fleece.
"Feast of the Epiphany" from Poetry in America by Julia Kasdorf, 2011.
Aired by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
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That was “Feast of the Epiphany” by Julia Spicher Kasdorf. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
