Merry Christmas. This is Bono the singer with U2.
  This is a poem I'd like to, recite for you by another Irishman, John F. Dean
  It's about driving to midnight mass in Dublin on Christmas Eve:
  
  Five-thousand million years ago, this earth lay heaving in a mass of rocks and fire
  Wasting, burdened with its emptiness
  Tonight, when arthropods and worms and sponges have given way to dinosaurs
  And dinosaurs to working, wandering apes
  Homo erectus have given way to sapiens, and he to
  Homo sapiens sapiens (alias Paddy Mack)
  
  Look down on Dublin from the hills around
  And lights could be a million Christmas trees
  Still firs standing, while in the sky a glow as if of dawn
  This day a light shall shine on us
  The Lord is born within our city
  
  Look along to the river toward O'Connell Bridge
  The lights, the neon signs, all stream on water like breathed-on strips of tinsel
  All is still...
  
  Eleven-thirty, pubs begin to empty
  Men stop to argue, sway and say the name of Jesus
  For those who have known darkness
  Who have now seen a wonderous light
  Those who have dwelt on unlit streets
  To them the light has come
  
  Tonight, few cars go by
  The blocks of flats with windowed-plastic trees
  And fairy lights stand, watching for a miracle
  Here are no dells where fairies might appear
  
  Out from the dark an ambulance comes speeding
  Sickly blue lights search in siren-still
  The mystery of the night ticks slowly on
  It will pass and leave memories of friends and small, half-welcomed things
  
  In Him was life
  In Him, life was the light of man
  For neither prehistoric swans nor trilobites, the mesozoic birds
  Neanderthal, nor modern man had ever dreamt or seen what was our God
  
  The shops are gay with lights and bright things
  All save funeral homes, they dare not advertise their presence
  As midnight peels and organs start to play
  Two cars meet headlong in a haze of drink
  The crash flicks into silence
  Pain crawls like a slime through blood and into limbs
  God is revealed, a baby naked, crying in a crib
  
  In the church porches and out along the grounds
  Teenagers laugh and swear, smokin', watchin' girls
  So, once more, Christmas trails away
  Its meaning moves back into the mist and the march of time