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.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox.
Christmas Eve is poet Angela Alaima O’Donnell’s favorite day of the liturgical year. She explains, “I love the anticipation of the birth of the Christ child as much as the birth itself—a fact that has been true since my childhood and became even more pronounced when I myself became an expectant mother (times three!).”
To find out more, listen to today’s sonnet, “Christmas Eve Eve.”
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD—a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University in New York City—serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. She has published eleven books of poems, including Holy Land (2022), which won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize, and Dear Dante, published in Spring 2024. Forthcoming in 2026, The View from Childhood is a poetry collection about family, coming of age, and the place(s) we call home.
Though she now lives in New York, Angela was born and raised in The Keystone State. Her Sicilian grandparents immigrated from Sicily to Northeastern PA in 1910 to work in the coal mines.
According to Angela, we celebrate the birth of Christ “in the dark of December, an unpropitious time of year … [to] better…see his identity as The Light of the World.”
Likewise, the poet confides, “even though each of my sons was born at a challenging moment in my life, I was quite certain that [each] baby was a sign of good things to come, a source of joy, and a well-spring of unimaginable love I would forever have access to.”
She further explains, “Every baby is a triumph, a miracle, a little king—every child brings new light to a dark world.”
May all your celebrations be filled with such light in this sometimes dark world.
Here’s “Christmas Eve Eve” by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell:
Christmas Eve Eve
-December 23
The day before the day before the day
we wait for all the rest of the year,
the stars’ hosanna, the donkey’s bray,
the young mother’s lullaby we hear
beneath the gusts of wind, the creaking eaves,
sounds of redemption that cure our care.
There are no doubters. Each of us believes
that birth is the only cure for death.
The holy howl of a baby’s first breath
is Eden’s miracle. All that has come
before, each deed of darkness, is undone
by every born child, not just the one.
This is life’s triumph. The newborn a king.
No wonder the donkeys and the angels sing.
Published at The Rabbit Room, December 23, 2024
That was “Christmas Eve Eve” by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. Thanks for listening. With Poetry Moment, I’m Marjorie Maddox.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
