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New Year Countdown

Published : Saturday, 29 December, 2018 at 12:00 AM  Count : 2035
With a New Year come new goals and resolutions, new experiences, and new beginnings-but also an opportunity to look at back at what changes the old year had brought. Kickoff your new year while waking the poet sleeping inside you.



Remember
Joy Harjo, 1951

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.




The Parting of the Year
Anna de Brémont
The midnight hour had come. With tearful eyes
And sad the Old Year strained I to my breast.
For we were loth to part-his lips I pressed
All tenderly in answer to his sighs.
A generous lover he; to say good-bye
Wrung heart and soul, bowed was his head and chilled
The hand with gifts and blessings lately filled.
'Twas hard to part-the dear Old Year and I.

 Lo! as he lingered, came thro' casement pane
 A silvery summons echoing far and near.
 He faltered, trembled, gasped, then thrust atwain
 The casement, vanished in the starlight clear,
 No vestige leaving of his happy reign,
 While hand in hand stood I and the New Year!





Burning the Old Year
Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.  
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,  
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,  
lists of vegetables, partial poems.  
Orange swirling flame of days,  
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn't,  
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.  
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,  
only the things I didn't do  
crackle after the blazing dies.

At the Entering of the New Year
Thomas Hardy

 

I
(OLD STYLE)
Our songs went up and out the chimney,
And roused the home-gone husbandmen;
Our allemands, our heys, poussettings,
Our hands-across and back again,
Sent rhythmic throbbings through the casements
 On to the white highway,
Where nighted farers paused and muttered,
 "Keep it up well, do they!"

The contrabasso's measured booming
Sped at each bar to the parish bounds,
To shepherds at their midnight lambings,
To stealthy poachers on their rounds;
And everybody caught full duly
The notes of our delight,
As Time unrobed the Youth of Promise
Hailed by our sanguine sight.


II
(NEW STYLE)
We stand in the dusk of a pine-tree limb,
As if to give ear to the muffled peal,
Brought or withheld at the breeze's whim;
But our truest heed is to words that steal
From the mantled ghost that looms in the gray,
And seems, so far as our sense can see,
To feature bereaved Humanity,
As it sighs to the imminent year its say:-

"O stay without, O stay without,
Calm comely Youth, untasked, untired;
Though stars irradiate thee about
Thy entrance here is undesired.
Open the gate not, mystic one;
 Must we avow what we would close confine?
 With thee, good friend, we would have converse none,
Albeit the fault may not be thine."


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Editor : Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury
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