A Christmas Poem From Boston

At the least scrape laid open (and shouldn’t they be ashamed?)
to the ripe chalk of their hearts (but they are all heart) four angels
puff at their golden trumpets, promise-crammed
like cornucopias of cotton candy.

Behind them, and of the selfsame gilded stuff
as the Statehouse, shepherds, kings, and some hard-shell sheep
sully, so poets say (and they ought to know), the steep
Common the shovels have sliced for us like divinity fudge,

where a friend of a friend of mine once (I was that close to it) ran
hobbling the blackest lamb in his woolly arms, and ran
till a patrolman nailed him and sent him up-
and-over to Joy Street Station to simmer down.

But they are good plaster creatures. They only
dream (as we all of us dream) a miraculous day
of Spirits spiriting every wiseman and shepherd away,
bringing for every plaster angel its plastered Angel.