New Years Reflection

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something. — Neil Gaiman

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SONGS about NEW YEAR:

• Auld Lang Syne performed by the Irish Rovers: https://youtu.be/XwkqYepulQ4
• Auld Lang Syne performed by Mariah Carey: https://youtu.be/Aop6YF1Xqqg
• What Are You Doing New Years Eve by Ella Fitzgerald (jazz): https://youtu.be/UFdfzNMV52Q
• What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? performed by Postmodern Jukebox ft. Rayvon Owen & Olivia Kuper Harris (jazz interpretation): https://youtu.be/EFIgMlBcKAs
• Happy New Year by ABBA (disco/pop): https://youtu.be/dvzc9QQevmo
• New Years Day by U2 (rock): https://youtu.be/jeYCyCaK_5k
• Its Just Another New Years Eve by Barry Manilow (pop): https://youtu.be/3wSP59NjoIY
• New Years Day by Bon Jovi (rock): https://youtu.be/_i5fBY3a5Q0
• Midnight by Berlon (rock/pop): https://youtu.be/q0KREEuMSgw
• Happy New Year Song by Sesame Street (children): https://youtu.be/mVl8QXijK_Q

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New Year — Michael Prior
I’ve resolved last year’s resolutions
watching this bonfire fail to flame.
I’ve ignored December’s iterations,
unsolved my consolations:
a card, a call, a paper crane’s blame-
less fractions of the same.
I can’t solve for time’s absolutions
watching these embers fail to flame.

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Burning the Old Year
— 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 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.

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Year’s End — 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 known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

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To the New Year — 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 calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

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At the New Year — Kenneth Patchen
In the shape of this night, in the still fall  of snow, Father
In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds  and children
In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys and the lovers, Father
In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise of our cities
In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches where the dead are, Father
In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners  out on the black water
In all that has been said bravely, in all that is mean anywhere in the world, Father
In all that is good and lovely, in every house where sham and hatred are
In the name of those who wait, in the sound  of angry voices, Father
Before the bells ring, before this little point in time  has rushed us on
Before this clean moment has gone, before this night  turns to face tomorrow, Father
There is this high singing in the air
Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window
And there are other bells that we would ring, Father
Other bells that we would ring.

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