Extracts from 'A Christmas Carol' a poem

But once upon a time - of all the good days in the year

Old Scrooge was in his counting house and looking quite austere.

No cheer was in the dark, cold room and this was Christmas Eve.

'Twas bleak and cold and biting, almost too cold to conceive.

The people in the court outside went wheezing up and down

Stamping their feet upon the stones to warm them on the ground.

It was quite dark already, though the clocks had just struck three.

There'd been no light throughout the day. It was quite hard to see.

The damp fog had been pouring in through keyhole and through chink,

So dense without it made the people wipe their eyes and blink.

It made the houses in the yard look like some ghostly form.

The low grey mist had covered all and nowhere here felt warm.

Obscuring all, the dingy, dank grey clouds came drooping down,

One might have thought that Nature lived hard by in the old town

And was brewing on a larger scale weather damp and cold

That made folk’s very bones feel blasted, brittle, sharp and old.

***********

The spirit did not tarry here but bade Scrooge hold his robe

And passing on above the moor they flew across the globe.

But whither? Not to sea? To sea? In horror Scrooge looked back.

He saw the last of land and then observed a frightful stack

Of rocks behind them and his ears were deafened by the waves.

The thundering crash of water that had sent men to their graves.

It rolled and roared and raged among the dreadful caverns there.

The sea had fiercely undermined the earth but did not scare

The two men who were looking at the light that shone to sea

Through a round loophole in the wall, so they could guarantee

To light the way for mariners upon that dreadful night.

The two men far from land and home were tending to that light.

They joined their horny hands over a table. Gave a toast

And wished each other Merry Christmas working at their post.

The elder with his damaged face so scarred by sun and sea

Struck up a sturdy song, just like the gale, quite forcefully.

**************

The chimes were ringing loudly the three quarters past the clock.

Precisely at that moment Scrooge looked down and gasped in shock.

'Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,'

Scrooge looked on quite intently. He'd a secret to unmask.

'I noticed something very strange. What is that I saw?

Protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot maybe or claw?'

'For all the flesh there is upon it, it might be a claw,'

Was its low, mournful answer. What a shock Scrooge had in store.

In the foldings of its robe two abject children crying.

Wretched, frightful, hideous. They looked like they were dying.

Quite miserable they knelt down at its feet and clung so hard

On the outside of its garment. Their hands and feet were scarred.

They were a boy and girl both hungry, ragged, scowling, gaunt,

So yellow, meagre, wolfish and a sight to surely haunt.

Whoever saw them so prostrate in their humility

Would have been moved by such a sight of vulnerability.

Scrooge, shocked and stunned right to the core, then went to turn away

'Oh, Man! look here! Look, look, down here!' he heard the Spirit say.

The children were pathetic, oh but they were prostrate too,

In all their humble supplication. What was Scrooge to do?

Where graceful childhood should have filled their tiny features out

And touched them with its freshest tints there could be little doubt -

Some stale and shrivelled hand like that of age, had taken hold

And twisted, pinched and pulled them into shreds. They looked so old.

Where angels might have sat enthroned, on childish innocence

Vile devils lurked there menacing with evil so intense.

In all creation's mysteries no monsters dire and dread,

No change, no degradation, no perversion - not a shred

Of humanity could have shocked Scrooge any more than this.

In having them revealed this way, he then tried to dismiss

His shock by saying they were 'fine'. The words stuck in his throat

And choked themselves on such a shameful, dire, deceitful, note,

Much rather than be parties to a statement false and crude.

A lie and a denial of such enormous magnitude.