Had We Only Known

"May this year bring us before it has flown
All we would have wished for had we only known."

New Year's Day Dusk
Brace yourself for an Ominous New Year!
(across the street from our house)

I shared this poem a year ago; here it is again!
I see now that it is one to re-read annually:

Another Year

Another year gone and the old man with the scythe
Is mowing closer. He hasn’t been subtle, has he.
Too many good people gone, and I could sit and cry
For them except that you look exceptionally snazzy
Despite the miles on your odometer,
As if you have a few more aces up your sleeve,
Maybe you were born under a lucky comet or
Maybe it’s the wine, but I do believe
When I look at you and take your hand you’re
Positively glowing. Maybe we’ve been sorry a
Long enough time and now we get some grandeur
And do our dance and sing our aria.
May this year bring us before it has flown
All we would have wished for had we only known.

by Gary Johnson
Contemporary American Poet

Our front porch on New Year's Eve Day
Lightning, thunder, rain, sun, all within a few minutes!

Monday, January 3rd
Brilliant sun and whirlwind snow all at once!
By nightfall, totally clear for viewing of
Crescent Moon, Venus, and Saturn.

As with Gary Johnson's "Another Year,"
this poem has appeared previously;
but from here on out, I plan to re-read it
not only at Thanksgiving, but
at the beginning of every strange new year . . .

Minnesota Thanksgiving

For that free Grace bringing us past great risks
& thro' great griefs surviving to this feast
sober & still, with the children unborn and born,
among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt
and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude.

We praise our ancestors who delivered us here
within warm walls all safe, aware of music,
likely toward ample & attractive meat
with whatever accompaniment
Kate in her kind ingenuity has seen fit to devise,

and we hope - across the most strange year to come -
continually to do them and You not sufficient honour
but such as we become able to devise
out of decent or joyful conscience & thanksgiving.
Yippee!
Bless then, as Thou wilt, this wilderness board.

by John Berryman, 1914 - 1972

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Along with my foreboding sense of an ominous,
strange year to come, I add this observation:

"What a hotchpotch the world was!"

I am beginning to think that this line from The Bell Jar
is the most important sentence that Sylvia Plath every wrote.