FAIRYTALE OF SALZBURG

1.

It was Christmas Eve, Babe.
Down on death row.
The young man said to me,
“Won’t see tomorrow.
Me from the whorehouse,
And you, the parsonage.
But pimps and priests like us,
You’re my spitting image.”

With oil and wafer,
I got on with last rites.
His eyes alive with impudence
As he mouthed his final secrets.
Then I walked out past the gallows
Where Godfather does business.
In all the stench and noise,
I searched for the stillness.

2.

A whore and a hangman
Are the only parents I know.
And to get into the vicar’s good graces
Don’t ask what I had to do.
But you do what needs doing,
To catch the eye of your uppers.
So I smiled like an angel,
While I sang for my supper.

To be gone from the mattress
That creaks like the scaffold,
I did my Latin and matins
That gave me the foothold.
I was diligence itself
Donning cassock and surplice.
Singing Kyries and Hosannas,
While keening for the stillness.

For Mama, too, did the Lord’s bidding,
With three bastard kids to nurture.
And Papi did what needs doing
Though it went against his nature.
More than all the psalms and scripture,
They taught me sacrifice.
For the forlorn and the shameworn
Then, I go to find the stillness.

It’s the sound of falling snow.
A rustle through a wind chime.
It’s the hush within the storm.
It’s the heartbeat of time.
It’s the song nearest silence
That, for an hour, or a week,
Brings peace to Mama, or to a world,
This stillness that I seek.

3.

I was the choir boy of old for Vespers
Before stepping out in the darkness.
Through the graveyard of St. Peter’s
Up to the hulking fortress.
Past the beggars and the drunkards,
The fishwives and the slatterns.
And all my broken brothers
From the brothels and the taverns.

And there, in the crew of outcasts
I saw the mocking face.
He smirked anew, and raised his glass
With a certain saving grace.
“If it isn’t Your Excellency.
Guess you know someone upstairs
Who gave me clemency.
’Cause, you know, Christmas.”

And all the whores and highwaymen
Were singing Tannenbaum.
I joined from afar, as I walked on
Into the noisesome calm.
Then the palest rose beneath the snow
Shimmered, like a silent bell for Christmas.
And I shivered with the queerest cold
For I had found the stillness.

It’s a lullabye for the homeless
Newborn babe, with matted curls.
Cooing forth forgiveness
For the Mamas and Papis of this world.
It’s the dreams of the fatherless throng
That I put with my own.
Can’t make it all alone,
I built their dreams into song.

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,

Alles schläft; einsam wacht.
Nur das traute, hochheilige Paar.
Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar.
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh.

Author’s notes: the writer of Silent Night, Joseph Mohrs, was born in Salzburg in 1792. He was the illegitimate son of a seamstress, Anna Shoiberin, and a mercenary soldier, Franz Mohrs. Anna likely took on additional work other than embroidery. She had three illegitimate children, and not only had to provide for them, but pay the fines leveed by the state for bearing children out of wedlock.

The last executioner of Salzburg, Franz Joseph Wohlmuth, was Mohrs’s godfather. Though his work was abhorrent, he had enough status to sponsor the boy’s baptism, without which there was little hope of gaining a craft or profession.

The vicar and choirmaster of Salzburg Cathedral, Johann Nepomuk Niernle, took the boy under his wing. He and others guided Mohrs on his extraordinary path to the priesthood. As an illegitimate son, he could not be ordained without dispensation, granted by Pope Pius VII.

Christmas pardons or clemencies were not uncommon in Austria in the 1800s.

The Christmas Rose is a white flower with toxic and purgative powers. In Alpine folklore, a poor girl who had no gifts for the Christ child wept, and the flowers bloomed where her tears fell.

On Christmas Day, 1914, the slaughter of World War I came to a halt when German and English troops sang Silent Night in unison across No Man’s Land. In some places for a few hours, in others for a week, soldiers exchanged gifts of tobacco and chocolate, shared family photographs, and helped to bury each other’s dead.

In that same war, it’s estimated that 75 to 85 percent of soldiers either did not fire their weapons or aimed into the air, as it was against their natures to shoot at other human beings.

Fairytale of New York by the Pogues is the most-played Christmas song in the UK, and number 8 globally. Silent Night is the most-recorded, with more than a hundred thousand versions in hundreds of languages, including Quechua, Xhosa and the nearly extinct tongue of Livonian.

Craig Constantine was born in San Francisco, in the Before Times. After tramping most of the American West and Canada, he has landed for a time in Los Angeles. He’s been a day laborer, bread baker, furniture mover, factory worker, and TV producer. Now a poet, the hardest, worst-paid, best job he’s had. His poems Tahoe Blue and Bad Songs appear in the current editions of The Crank and 34th Parallel magazine. Craig lives with his wife Stacey and son Chris in the namesake haunted house, along with Cody the Border Collie, numerous koi, and a family of owls.