A new year poem
Dear Lord, soon the New Year will be on us,
And if I’m surprised, blame it on my slowness
To understand how unyielding is time,
That the clock keeps ticking even if I’m
Asleep or absent or preoccupied.
And by the way, there is no place for pride,
How frail we are, just think of the past weeks,
The rains that ripped apart rivers and creeks,
The floods that sank the cities in the south,
Leaving without breath or bread many a mouth,
And I thought they happened only in stories,
Although in my lifetime there were villages
That were buried in landslides or wiped out
By waves—now the skeptic flaunts his pet doubt
About a truly good and loving God,
But personally I just find it odd
That he should forget there is such as choice,
And that a smoker who loses his voice,
Or his lungs, cannot ascribe his despair
To other than his willful lack of care,
As to the different catastrophes
That visit us, they are the atrophies
Of the physical world, given its limits,
And these, we should add, man himself permits
To happen with a greater devastation
By obstinately harming God’s creation,
As to death, this is but Time’s fruit, the falling
That happens, of which there is no forestalling,
After which something comes—I remember
A time when a typhoon struck like a hammer,
It moved our car a meter from the garage
And kept us inside with our useless courage,
When it was all clear we stepped outside
And what we saw was a world that had died—
The tree in the yard was a skeleton,
The neighbor’s gaze was that of one snake-bitten,
Homes that had lost either their walls or roof
Could offer of life precious little proof,
With a gray sameness, day came after day,
And then on quite an ordinary Sunday,
The morning seemed to me as different,
Still the same, yes, yet of itself a variant,
Because the bare, broken trees had leaflets now,
Green fuzz where before nothing was on the bough,
And roofs that as yet covered just one half
Stretched out to cap the length of one full laugh—
And it is this, the something that comes after,
That, despite past events, should really matter,
And that makes time a striving after grace,
And not mere waiting for what might take place.
Lord, truly the New Year is a source
Of thanks, for you have helped us stay the course.
And since in your time it is always morning
Command the sunlight to stay while we’re singing,
Or else give us the grace to keep the tune
As morning journeys towards afternoon.
Teach us the transitoriness of pain
And the persistency of love again.
Does not the stone that they installed to block
Christ’s tomb have the like roundness of the clock?
Now since it’s almost midnight let me pair
This rambling poem with a little prayer—
May we live every moment in your Word,
I thank and praise you for the New Year, Lord.
