It has been a tough year for many, but if you are reading this, you only have a few hours to make it across the threshold into a new year—one that hopefully we can shape a little more to our liking, but probably one that we will soon be glad to push away on our march through the years. Here is to blessings more than curses for 2021!
as you sit in darkness,
play with your reading glasses
and wait for the final chime,
take a moment to pause
on the white left on each page,
the falling curtain
of unblemished snow
upon this cruel year
close your journal
then reach for another
unfolding with the excitement
of not knowing
what the next day offers
or even if you will wake
to another December blizzard
and a chance
to finish this new volume,
leaving footprints
across one more set of
clean white pages
before your steps
are forever filled in
by the falling snow
| Copyright © 2020 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He also dabbles in short fiction and may be onto some ideas for a novel. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there. In September 2020, he started the blog “Disturbing the Pond.” |
If you are ever asked to give a graduation speech, just recite this. Then maybe recite it again. Bravo, sir, bravo.
ReplyDeleteThis evening, because we watched as our last movie of 2020 George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky*, your metaphor for death strikes me as chillingly apt:
ReplyDelete...your steps
...forever filled in
by the falling snow
_________
* This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine, a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully and her fellow astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.