First Christmas

COVID-19 has made Stan Rogers’s ‘First Christmas’ a song for us all. As a part of my own meditation on not making it home this year, I’ve written a verse:

She’s always thinking of how to help the ones she loves,
So she’s spent an hour staring at the phone.
Whishing that she didn’t have to call,
to make real after all That she won’t be coming home…

But there’s just no guarantee she’d arrive COVID free
and her mother’s not doing very well.
She never thought she’d chose to be alone,
to spend Christmas far from home.

First Christmas, away from home.