Hello New Years Babes! Here’s some poetry about New Years Eve, Day, Renewal, and Endings/Beginning that’s empowered me forward lately. As a bonus, here’s a playlist full of even more new years vibes:
Amanda Gorman, New Day’s Lyric
Here’s a link to our national youth poet laureate on her instagram in a video performing her new poem — definitely recommend watching/listening to this in-full, or simply reading the poem aloud yourself. The meter and build is so brilliantly written to flow, you can feel the courage coursing through each line break.Giving determination for a new day.
From ‘New Day’s Lyric’ (full text linked here)
We heed this old spirit,
In a new day’s lyric,
In our hearts, we hear it:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
Be bold, sang Time this year,
Be bold, sang Time,
For when you honor yesterday,
Tomorrow ye will find.— Amanda Gorman
Ella Wilcox, The Year
Joy Harjo, This Morning I Pray for my Enemies
This Morning I Pray for my Enemies
And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
Mary Oliver, The Journey
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
A BONUS Mary Oliver New Years-ish poem I won’t pull-out here:
Mary Oliver, Praying
Naomi Shihab Nye, Burning the Old Year
Burning the Old Year
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.
Saeed Jones, voice memo “I Don’t Know What’s Around the Corner”
Maya Angelou, A Brave and Startling Truth
From ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’v (full text linked here)
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
Adam Powers, Renewal, Renewable
Sing a song with the breeze
the same winds of change
Singing songs with the leaves
let them wind-power our ageSpring forward with the seasons
sun-spreading buds blossoming
Spring towards solar-powered freedoms
electrons dancing, ancestors honoring
A BONUS New Years poem I won’t pull-out here: