Driving to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve
Author	John F. Dean
Date	December 31, 1983
Recited by	Bono
Streaming  Real Audio	3 minutes 10 seconds

                

This poem by Irish poet John F. Dean was recided by Bono for a radio show on or around December 31, 1983.  This is a very rare recital of a wonderfully vivid poem.  Enjoy!
 

Driving to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve
by John F. Dean

Five-thousand million years ago, this earth lay heaving in a mass of rocks and fire, waste and burdened with it's emptiness. Tonight, when arthropods  and worms and sponges have given way to dinosaurs, and dinosaurs to working, wandering apes; Homo erectus have given way to sapiens, and he to Homo sapiens sapiens (alias paddimack). Look down on Dublin from the hills
around and lights could be a million Christmas trees, still firs standing, while in the sky a glow as if of dawn. This day a light shall shine upon us. The Lord is born within our city.

Look along to the river toward O'Connel Bridge. The lights, the neon signs, all the streams on the water like breathed-on strips of tinsel. All is still. Eleven-thirty, pubs begin to empty. Men stop to argue, sway and say the name of Jesus. For those who have known darkness, who have now seen a wonderous light; those who have dwelt in unlit streets, to them the light has come. Tonight, a few cars go by. The block of flats with window-plastic
trees and fairy lights stand, watching for a miracle. Here are no dells where fairies might appear.

Out from the dark an ambulance comes speeding, sickly blue lights search in siren-still. The mystery of the night ticks slowly on. It will pass and leave memories of friends and small, half-welcomed things. 

In Him was life. In Him, life was the light of man. For neither prehistoric swans nor trilobites, the mesozoic birds, Neanderthal, nor modern man had ever dreamt or seen what was our God.

The shops are gay with lights and bright things. All-safe funeral homes, they dare not advertise their presence. As midnight peels and organs start to play, two cars meet headlong in a haze-o'-drink. The crash flicks into silence. Pain crawls like a slime through blood and into the limbs. God is revealed, a baby, naked, crying in a crib.

In the church porches and out along the grounds, teenagers laugh and swear, smokin', watchin' girls. So, once more, Christmas trails away. It's meaning moves back into the mist and the march of time...