New Year Welcome

Welcome to the first Poetry Friday of 2017.

"And now let us welcome the new year—full of things that have never been." — Rainer Maria Rilke.

          Including this first Poetry Friday of 2017! For those who follow some holidays after Christmas, Firday is Epiphany, Three King’s Day, or The Twelfth Day of Christmas.  

          I have known the above quote for a long time (perhaps you have, too?). And I

use it in some way on every year beginning. This year, it feels both dark and light, considering my concerns about the coming change in our government, yet I know there will be marvelous things to celebrate too. A few years ago it became more special. A friend of mine gave me A Year With Rilke, translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows and I began morning reads from this anthology, thoughtful, sometimes seeming to apply to my life so closely that it made me shiver. Other days I read and passed on by. Here at the beginning of the new year, words fly about with OLWs, resolutions, wonderful poems, and quotes. I actually started a file to keep some that I’ve especially loved.

Today I’ll share one of the poems from A Year With Rilke, a favorite for beginnings. This also connects to me because I want to say thank you to Mary Lee Hahn and Catherine Flynn for their challenges that began December 1^st, #haikuforhealing and #commonplacemarvels. It was a pleasant thing to slide into this daily writing, and we have continued. If you’d like to join, some share on Facebook, but most are sharing on twitter. Take a look! Also, I joined Jone MacCulloch’s poetry postcard greet the new year group, and it’s wonderful to find a poem in my mailbox!  

 

Entering, from Book of Images

Whoever you may be: step into the evening.

Step out of the room where everything is known.

Whoever you are,

your house is the last before the far-off.

With your eyes, which are almost too tired

to free themselves from the familiar,

you slowly take one black tree

and set it against the sky: slender, alone.

And you have made a world.

It is big

and like a word, still ripening in silence.

And though your mind would fabricate its meaning,

your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.

Sign up with your link, and have a perfect Poetry Friday. We’ve had winter return these past few days, and I imagine the storm is on its way to those in the Midwest and East. Keep warm, make soup, and revel in the beauty!