Poets’ Corner: A Nugget for the New Year

29 Dec Poets’ Corner: A Nugget for the New Year

You’ve made a little list and checked it twice. No, not that list. Christmas is over. Your New Year’s Eve resolutions. The top 10 usually include losing weight, eating more healthily, exercising more, stopping smoking, sticking to a budget, saving money, getting more organized, being more patient, finding a better job and just being a better person over all. But in general, a New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other. Resolutions aside, regular contributor David Feela regards the coming New Year as a time to reflect on the way you were. Cue Streisand singing “The Way We Were.” So read David’s poem and raise a glass of champagne to making more memorable moments in 2016. Later for the list.

In Praise of Insulation

The roof, shed of its snowpack,

gathers the sun’s heat again.

Upstairs under the shingles

the attic warms while

outside the temperature

hasn’t climbed above freezing.

On such a day I could lift

from the mausoleum of dusty boxes

my dimmest memories and hold them

under the glare of a bare bulb

but it has all been so neatly packed away.

To open one box would only

lead to another, and what is the past

if not an accumulation of things we

can not touch wrapped up in the feeling

that we also can not let them go.

And, as an after thought for history geeks, did you know the first New Year was celebrated 4,000 years ago by the ancient Babylonians? Or that it is a tradition to ring in New Year’s with family and friends because the first people you see will either give you good luck or bad luck. So make sure to keep friends close and foes very far away.