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It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

Stuart Butler

Thursday, December 27th, 2018

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
When angels bent down to the earth,
And changed machine guns into harps,
And turned leaden bullets into golden carols
That drifted across no man’s land,
And choirs of soldiers joined the angels
In a cease-fire of exultation,
While all the bloodied uniformed citizens
Of heaven above watched as silent knights,
As helmets and caps and whisky and schnapps
Were passed from frozen side to frozen side,
When a Tommy kicked a football up into the air,
And there it stayed, suspended high up in the sky,
Shining for ever in a continent’s memory;
A star of peace in a bleak midwinter’s century.

Notes

Revisited to mark the 100th anniversdary of the end of WW1.
First published here 2005.

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Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/it-came-upon-a-midnight-clear-2/