Happy New Year - Jan 7 2021

 

Happy New Year

Jan 7 2021

January 7

dawned sunny and warm.

The sky was that deep winter blue,

and the eaves, brimming with snow

dripped

then trickled

then streamed.

As if a bewildered world

had been abruptly released

from its usual deep-freeze,

eager to make every second count

before the gods of weather

come to their senses

and the cold, as expected, returned.

Almost a week in

to a new year

and the novelty is gone.

When once again we had hopefully thought

that with the turning of the calendar

at least something would change;

but it's still the middle of winter

and the news is just as disheartening

and all the hard resolutions have lost.

And with this unseasonable weather

I'm feeling out of sorts

and more and more unmoored.

A feeling that persists

as day turns quickly to night.

When there's a damp cold,

the kind that chills to the marrow

no matter how you dress.

When Christmas trees, no longer festive

lie where they were dumped by the curb,

stranded morosely

in lumpy sodden snow.

And when icicles loom from sagging eaves,

lethal daggers

dangling overhead.

A week in

and we've gotten over saying

have a happy new year.

Not that we don't wish it,

but it seems excessive

after 7 days.

Perhaps the 8^th will be better.

Another warm day

in a world without winter,

as the calendar keeps counting down

and the sun

heats relentlessly up.

One of those days when I felt like writing, but had no idea or inspiration. So I thought what could be more obvious than a new year's poem. I began with no preconception. So the negativity of this poem must have seeped up from my subconscious.

Perhaps it's the unseasonable weather. When even the deniers of climate change must be having second thoughts, and catastrophists like me sink deeper into despair.

Or the unthinkable happenings in the U.S., when we were just coming to hope that the madness of the Trump years – with less than 2 weeks left in his benighted single term – were at an end.

Or maybe it's the sense of desperation I always get from the New Year bacchanal: the unacknowledged but understood artificiality of a change in calendar, as if we're trying to fool ourselves into false hope; the social pressure to party, along with the pathetic fear of missing out; and the self-destructive excess of over-eating and getting drunk.

So even a beautiful day, which is where the poem begins, is unable to warm my heart. Especially in a new year when even the optimists are consoling themselves by saying: “Well, couldn't be worse”!