Advent Calendar Day 14 - November 25
Happy book release day to V. B. Price and Innocence Regained: The Christmas Poems 2025-1969.
Enjoy these excerpts from the updated collection and order today for a 25% discount.
About the Christmas Poems
In 1969, V. B. Price wrote a small poem that he gave to his friends and loved ones for Christmas. He has continued that tradition each year ever since. This second edition of Innocence Regained collects more than fifty years of those intimate and inquisitive poems, including some of Price’s most recent and most inspired work.
Today only, get 25% off orders for this new release—no code required.
The Cosmic Matter Miracle of Being Loved
It’s the people who happen to us,
who give themselves to us, show us
likenesses of who we could become;
they become themselves in us
a cheering crowd of influence. But there’s
always one arch-guide, innocent of power,
who gave us all we needed at the time.
Tut was mine, Tut of the gardener’s
huge hard hands and smile, a surrogate
father who survived the trenches
of World War One, survived the low-life hate
of Tuskegee and Jim Crow, and then,
in a miracle of courage
turned from his fate on an odyssey
toward home, driving impossibly west
in the 1920s to Pasadena
and found himself years later
as an older man in 1947, still
making things grow, with me
at six under his wing,
orphaned almost, bare-boned,
Spare Ribs he called me.
Tut saw to it that I’d grow up
to have a funny bone.
He schooled me in how I could
prevail, make the miracle choices
of my own that would save my life
from the accidents of my birth.
(2024)
The Cosmic Matter Miracle of Being Loved
When you turn the other cheek for a kiss
you might get a slap, so look over there
at the wind strumming through the elms,
at her sly grin nuzzling with her daughter,
at that dragonfly hovering through the daisies,
320 million years of flight, the first of things alive
to fly, or at your own twisted, bulging knuckles,
or even at the white banded gray-sky river stone,
worshipping the magic that you see. It’s not a trick
but a spell that overcomes you, as when you find
millions of stars by merely moving aside a curtain at three AM
on a train crossing the Mojave Desert, a galaxy caught
in the image of your eye wild open in the window,
transfixed under the spell of your soaring feral wonder.
(2022)
Read more of these poems in V. B. Price’s INNOCENCE REGAINED:
The Christmas Poems 2025-1969, available today.
Also: today only, get 25% off this new and updated edition.
About the Author
V. B. Price has been publishing poetry since 1962, and he has worked continuously as a reporter and an environmental and political columnist for nearly as long. He has received the New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award for contributions to the life of the poetry community in the Southwest. He is the author of several books from Casa Urraca Press, including Orpheus the Healer, Lucretius and the Logic of Venus, and Polishing the Mountain. He lives in Albuquerque.