The Year Gone By

The Year - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

Winter Solstice

H

Solstice II - Kathleen Jamie

Here comes the sun 

                       summiting the headland - pow!

straight through the windows of the 10.19

- and here's us passengers,

                     splendid and blinking

                                 like we're all re-born,

remade exactly, and just where we left off:

the students, the toddler, the tattoo'd lass,

the half-dozen roustabouts

                                   headed off-shore

                                            cracking more beers and more jokes.

Angus at midwinter

                                 or near as makes no odds -

faint shadows raxed

over fields of dour earth,

every farmer's fenceposts

                                    splashed with gold.

The Christmas Letter

The Christmas Letter - John M. Morris

Wherever you are when you receive this letter
I write to say we are still ourselves
in the same place
and hope you are the same.

The dead have died as you know
and will never get better,
and the children are boys and girls
of their several ages and names.

So in closing I send you our love
and hope to hear from you soon.
There is never a time
like the present. It lasts forever
wherever you are. As ever I remain.

Forecasts

This was the poem for today in the 'Poem for Every Day of the Year' anthology. I love how the dominant feeling of hope is subtly, but powerfully presented.


Forecasts - Jean Kenward

There are berries this year on the holly
it wasn't always so.
They may be simply a forecast,
forecast of snow.

This frost on the sill
I've seen it glitter with diamond light.
It' slippery too, the traveller must
watch his step tonight.

There's a moon as big as a melon
and far off, oh how far
flickering on the horizon
a fresh and different star.

In the heart of man is a coldness.
Through a crack in the stable door
there glimmers a new dominion.
Even ice can thaw.