I hope you enjoyed this collection of New Year’s poems as much as I enjoyed collecting them. If you are looking for more New Year’s poems to read you can look through 25 Poems About Life and Resilience, 15 Poems About Happiness, or 33 Nature Poems. Happy New Year. May 2021 have less tragedy and be a pathway to a healthier, safer, and more equitable society. It doesn’t have to bethe blue iris, it could beweeds in a vacant lot, or a fewsmall stones; justpay attention, then patch Letters swallow themselves in seconds.Notes friends tied to the doorknob,transparent scarlet paper,sizzle like moth wings,marry the air. 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. You must hold your quiet center,where you do what only you can do.If others call you a maniac or a fool,just let them wag their tongues.If some praise your perseverance,don’t feel too happy about it—only solitude is a lasting friend. Some folks fool themselves into believing, But I know what I know once, at the heightOf hopeless touching, my man and I holdOur breaths, certain we can stop time or maybe This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint’s falsetto. Only youDon’t know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The bling, white, awful, inaccessible slant. In the beginning,in the list of begats,one begatgot forgot:work begets work(one poembearsthe next). Yesterday: me, a stone, the river,a bottle of Jack, the cloudswith unusual speed crept by. To read more of Katie Condon’s poems check out Praying Naked. When you see water in a streamyou say: oh, this is streamwater;When you see water in the riveryou say: oh, this is waterof the river;When you see ocean wateryou say: This is the ocean’swater! The people I love bestjump into work head firstwithout dallying in the shallowsand swim off with sure strokes almost out sight.They seem to become natives of the element,the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. Dividethe yearinto seasons,four,subtractthe snow thenaddsome moregreen, When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin far of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. Try to praise the mutilated world.Remember June’s long days,and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.The nettles that methodically overgrowthe abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. With what stillness at last you appear in the valleyyour first sunlight reaching downto touch the tips of a fewhigh leaves that do not stiras thought they had not noticedand did not know you at allthen the voice of a dove callsfrom far away in itselfto the hush of the morning The rain is a broken piano,playing the same note over and over. My five-year-old said that.Already she knows loving the world means loving the wobblesyou can’t shim, the creaks you can’t oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.
