Helen Mort - Nativity

There’s me, and you and Mexborough’s barmaid of the year,
her tinselled hair, her eyebrows drawn on retrospectively.

Outside, the landscape’s hardening, the trees
arthritic with new frost, but here, it’s manger-warm

and there’s a tree a man could pass out underneath
and not be found until New Year,

red baubles you can bloody your reflection in
and crowning it, the windowpane, the beer-dark sky,

holding a single star, the distant kind,
its faithful wink leading us on.

This poem is published as part of National Poetry Day 2012, theme: stars.

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985. Her collection Division Street is forthcoming from Chatto & Windus. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, the shape of every box and a pint for the ghost, a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2010. Five-times winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, she received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she became the youngest ever poet in residence at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

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