New Year Poems

Happy New Year, all.

I haven’t been on line so much over the winter. Not much to make one want to be, in many ways.

Anyway, I wrote a couple of poems on New Years Day, one a little more hopeful than the other.

Hope you like them.

One of the plant pots on my balcony, with Alyssum, a small seedling of those tomato-like plants, and some other species like navelwort and Arabidopsis/ rock cress that self-seeded.

            Rewilding Little Lives 

Flowers in my window box this New Years Day

Brought smiles to see flies upon the white petals

Delightfully drawn to pollinate these late blooms

Providing provender in winter and spring seeds.

.

Insight that acts of rewilding can be so easy:

Simply leave a little land for life, and equally

Life will return once we allow it land, thus we

Keep everything alive a little longer by these 

Little acts and actions, ceding some concrete 

So when our concrete recedes life can yet proceed.

.

            Nothing Changes On New Year’s Day

We kiss at midnight and wish

One another the best, that 

The world will rise above our 

Worries with the coming year;

.

Raise our champagne to celebrate

Our survival of the last, then we

Rest in unhurried slumber, until

The bells ring in the faithful for

.

New year’s Service, and we 

Step out to see too the debris,

Finding revellers have left their

Refuse in the most amazing places.

.

Picking up a cracked plastic party

Trumpet, we ponder if we will play

These in the next decades, and stroll

Slowly to our sacred spaces, with 

.

A grim smile, while the sun slants low,

Watching Earth go round just the way 

It spun yesterday, today.

Last Dance

            The Dance of the Gnats

In slanting sunlight along hedges warmed

Hordes of gnats amass in glittering swarms

Like plumes of dust thrust up

From the ground burst open, abounding,

In an ultimate race to lay eggs ere autumn:

.

A bountiful sign summer rests on last legs,

Yet, at least, as the flourishing knots

Feed the gathering flocks of swallows

Ere their exodus, fill lizards left lying on

Stone even cooling, fatten bats come twilight,

.

An indication our Earth brims, still:

Life resides, ready to thrive when we let it.

While they fly I will delight

In the dance as long as lasts this light.

Autumn has finally arrived, with a storm, some rain and wind and now chilly foggy mornings. And very happy we are to see it, and the flies dying as they should to be born again next spring…