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New Year's Eve
December 31, 1975
By Miguel Algarín
Richie playing the maracas
is the universe becoming fluid
and the Nuyorican Café
floor becoming platform
for the shape of art
to mimic so that the artifact
becomes direct message
no symbols of
but the very thing itself
the knife in...
Before the Mirror on New Year’s Eve
By Philip Metres
Take this glass, quoting me darkly:
Cassandra, coalmine canary.

I want to sing the confusing flesh,
The confounding joyful leash,

Flesh that stretches planet-wide
If a planet were human-sized.

These pulsing thermal layers we wear,
Not the myriad places they tear.

The sweet and acrid cabbage head,
Its labyrinths...
New Year's Eve 1989
By Bill Zavatsky
Up on the roof, waiting for the fireworks to begin
in warm winter rain, a moment ago I stepped
from the elevator into the black air
of an almost New Year
and need a minute to catch my breath
at the spread of city open...
New Year's Poem
By Margaret Avison
The Christmas twigs crispen and needles rattle
Along the window-ledge.
A solitary pearl
Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party
Lies in the suety, snow-luminous plainness
Of morning...
- New Year
- Joy & Contentment
Year’s End
By Richard Wilbur
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve...
“Your Luck Is About To Change”
By Susan Elizabeth Howe
Ominous inscrutable Chinese news
to get just before Christmas,
considering my reasonable health,
marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan,
career running like a not-too-old Chevrolet.
Not bad, considering what can go wrong:
the bony finger of Uncle Sam
might point out my...
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 106
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is...
The birthday of the world
By Marge Piercy
On the birthday of the world
I begin to contemplate
what I have done and left
undone, but this year
not so much rebuilding

of my perennially damaged
psyche, shoring up eroding
friendships, digging out
stumps of old resentments
that refuse to rot on their own.

No, this year I...
Grayed In
By Martha Collins
1

Snow fallen, another going
gone, new come in, open
the door:
each night I grow
young, my friends are well
again, my life is all
before me,
each morning
I close a door, another door.

2

Cloud on cloud, gray
on gray, snow fallen

on snow, tree on tree
on unleafed...
Snowfall
By Ravi Shankar
Particulate as ash, new year's first snow falls
upon peaked roofs, car hoods, undulant hills,
in imitation of motion that moves the way

static cascades down screens when the cable
zaps out, persistent & granular with a flicker
of legibility that dissipates before it can...
New Year
By Bei Dao
Translated By David Hinton
a child carrying flowers walks toward the new year
a conductor tattooing darkness
listens to the shortest pause

hurry a lion into the cage of music
hurry stone to masquerade as a recluse
moving in parallel nights

who's the visitor? when the days all
tip from nests...
January 1919
By Christopher Middleton
What if I know, Liebknecht, who shot you dead.
Tiergarten trees unroll
staggering shadow, in spite of it all.
I am among the leaves; the inevitable
voices
have nothing left to say, the holed head
bleeding across a heap of progressive magazines;
torn from your face,
trees that...
1 January 1965
By Joseph Brodsky
The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till...
Requiem for the New Year
By Mary Karr
On this first dark day of the year
      my daddy was born lo
these eighty-six years ago who now
      has not drawn breath or held
bodily mass for some ten years and still
      I have not got used to it.
My mind can still form to...
December 31st
By Richard Hoffman
All my undone actions wander
naked across the calendar,

a band of skinny hunter-gatherers,
blown snow scattered here and there,

stumbling toward a future
folded in the New Year I secure

with a pushpin: January’s picture
a painting from the 17th century,

a still life: Skull and mirror,
spilled...
on new year’s eve
By Evie Shockley

       we make midnight a maquette of the year:
frostlight glinting off snow to solemnize
       the vows we offer to ourselves in near
silence: the competition shimmerwise

       of champagne and chandeliers to attract
laughter and cheers: the glow from the fireplace
       reflecting the...
Burning the Old Year
By Naomi Shihab Nye
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...
January, 1795
By Mary Robinson
Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Titled gluttons dainties carving,
Genius in a garret starving.

Lofty mansions, warm and spacious;
Courtiers cringing and voracious;
Misers scarce the wretched heeding;
Gallant soldiers fighting, bleeding.

Wives who...
January 22nd, Missolonghi
By Lord Byron (George Gordon)
'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
       Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
                                    Still let me love!

   My days are in the yellow leaf;
       The flowers and fruits of Love...
To the New Year
By W. S. Merwin
With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove...

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