New Year 2005

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Note on "The New of the Year"

Before starting, here are two things to help you enjoy the poem more fully. As a preamble to the first, I want you to know I’m not getting scholarly or academic on you like poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; it’s just not my style. But the sound of plus clair, the French phrase, conveys so much more the feeling (and so the meaning) of “more clear”, that I decided it belonged. The second thing is the primary meaning of the word lumen, which was a new discovery to me, too. It not only is the root for words of light like luminous, luminosity, and luminary, the kind of brightness I wanted to convey; it first means “inner open space, opening” which, if you use for a little brooding on the poem, may deepen your experience of it.

	The New of the Year
	Songs to the new are old experiences we’ve had. Then watched the past, it seems, regain its hold on all we hoped was safe from cyn- ical recycling. “Nothing under the sun is new”, haunts us, cold close to coming dates beyond the baby year, soon drawn in adolescent yawn . . . “The New Year’s just a con.” Strange, then, to see a light so far inside we wonder, “Mirage?” But it’s not dim nor vague, plus clair and lumen than anything out here. Yet way inside our range while we are drawn like bees to honeycomb most sure it shines the future here— so vividly, so clear— full free from frown, from fear, companion to New the Year.