Month of Poetry #1: A Poem for New Year's Day, 2018

I will definitely not be posting all my Month of Poetry efforts, but I do like to put my New Year's Day poem, so here it is!

A Poem for the New Year, 2018

The new year arrived quietly, while I was almost sleeping;
tucked up against a warm-flush child, her face a mirror of passing dreams
half-smiles and flickering eyelids a semaphore of visions under the skin

The new year: not in coloured skies and disinhibited screaming
but softly, in even breath and the sussuration of trees
between one moment and the next, slipping in under the door

The newborn to replace the dead, as it always does
and the calendar turns over

And we have done this before
and will do this again
and it will, every time, mean both nothing and something:

caught in the human mystery of renewal
the seductive belief in clean pages and blank slates
the mesmerising idea that we, too, can be born fresh

a new self for a new year
forgiven our trespasses, and forgiving those who trespassed against us
here in this year that is granted to us all, every one:
this new-hatched year, with no pain in it yet.

- Kathy, 1/1/18