Advent Calendar Day 24 - December 5
To close out this season’s Advent Calendar of Bookish Delights, enjoy these poems from V. B. Price.
Plus, enjoy 24% off the new second edition of Innocence Regained: The Christmas Poems 2025-1969, today only.
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 24% off this new release—just in time for Christmas delivery.
from Six Liberties of Compassion
II. Becoming
We perceive and we imagine all at once.
No observation is without opinion.
The galaxies in their glory are not glorious to all.
Black holes are irresistible to those depressed,
swallowing light to prove that chemistry is a destiny
we can’t escape. We’re never free of who we are.
“We believe and we become.”
The cat dies and we fall apart, as if the whole world
had crashed into another world we didn’t see.
In the same way that death can never be wrong,
there cannot be an inside without an outside,
a before without a now and a now without an after.
Just born, just dead, we are timeless in between.
Becoming new is how we see it.
Everything’s easy if you want it to be,
even dying on the vine, even falling into a crack
in the memory of the times. Imagination
lasts and lasts: it’s what we do with who we are.
We don’t need a Virgil to teach us our little hells.
Kindness is such an easy lesson to be learned
because it is so easy to return.
III. Empathy
When the caverns of our consciousness,
dark as the void the stars invade, transform into
sewers of hate or fear, when radiant interiors,
filled with forms of things unknown, become for each
a cloaca for the roaring Shadow of the Age,
empathy as compassion, a gift to all,
dulls into an empathy of us and them,
forcing some to scrub the streets on their knees,
while others are given the golden peace
of living without fear gnawing at their faces.
When empathy excludes, adoring some
as soapy babies, boiling others in pits
of blame they don’t deserve,
when we cannot cut all others
the same slack we cut ourselves,
we become vaults slammed shut and locked.
Hope bounces off us like a hammer on a block of steel,
the holy monsters of the mind make caves of wonder
into bowels of pain—we must choose which one prevails.
Kindness is such an easy lesson to be learned,
because it is so easy to return.
V. Friendship
It took one word and she knew
exactly what I meant. Old friends in love
are a culture of two, a tribe on a lonely veld
where languages spring up like shadows
that define, unique codes of inside jokes, taboos,
“you had to be there” ways of being true.
We are a form our freedom takes. We know
what to say and what not to say,
and when and where to say it and to not.
It takes a look, one shift of the shoulder, one
glancing off at the tree tops to say
a sonnet worth of sympathy
in an exhalation of relief—like loyalty
through the slippery wobblings of accident
and history’s trap teaches us to understand
the echoes of our inner lives that sound
between us, as real as when we have befriended
who we are, ourselves, without constraint.
Banish accusation and unrequited gloom.
Kindness is such an easy lesson to be learned
because it is so easy to return.
(2014)
Read more of these poems in V. B. Price’s INNOCENCE REGAINED:
The Christmas Poems 2025-1969, available today.
Also: today only, get 24% 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.