Tag: New Years

Beginning, Again by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Beginning, Again

Minty spittle slithers down
the handle of my toothbrush.
It’s a cold sunny morning
with new batteries; my teeth
are excited for a fresh start.
I didn’t have high expectations
for last year, a pessimistic way
to say I surpassed my goals.
(well, some of them, anyway)
This year, I feel more confident—
until a splash of cold hits my face.

             breaking news
             holding hope
             for the midterms

*

Shawn Aveningo Sanders shares the creative life with her husband in Beaverton, where they run a small press, The Poetry Box. Over 200 of Shawn’s poems have appeared worldwide, most recently in ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, McQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, Cloudbank, and Love Is for All of Us. Shawn is a multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Touchstone Award nominee and has won prizes from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her newest book Pockets (MoonPath Press) was a finalist in Concrete Wolf’s Chapbook Contest. When she’s not writing, you might find her shopping for a new pair of red shoes or toy dinosaurs for her granddaughter. (RedShoePoet.com)

Now by Julia Caroline Knowlton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Now

Quick as a key turn or July clouds
releasing downpours, I suddenly
loved you more as you admired

aloud the word maintenant – “now” –
mentioning its literal meaning:
holding a hand. Fifty years of French

and I had never picked that lock.
Now the present folds me
in its have and hold vow,

future pressed to past, palm
to warm palm. Every word my own
swollen cloud, shaped like a clock.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has won two separate Georgia Author of the Year awards for her poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is a children’s book. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.

Why We Need New Year’s Day and the Passage of Seasons by Daniel Simpson

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Why We Need New Year’s Day and the Passage of Seasons

Because we are iron in a smithy world
which heats and hammers us beyond self-recognition,
leaving us slow to learn renewal,
too grumpy or fogged most mornings
to notice that our hearts still surge blood
to every point along the body’s map,
and that our minds are still what computers emulate.

After all, even monks with no other life
cannot harness themselves to awareness every second.
And yet, a garbage collector I know
carries his life like a diamond,
and an exhausted mother
immersed in four-child babble all day
hitches her mind to a book each night,
if only for five minutes
before she careens into sleep.

Praise, then, to the policeman who paints portraits,
and to the bank teller who keeps a journal.
Praise to the thwarted shop steward who keeps
his standing appointment to play catch with his child.
Praise to the heartbroken social worker who subscribes to the symphony.
Praise to the math teacher who photographs birds,
and to the roofer who, hoping for hope,
believes that, next year, his team will do better.

Praise the toddler and the hospice-dweller
as they stumble in new passages.
Praise all who breathe.
Praise all who once breathed and now nourish the ground.
Praise all whose stories have already been written,
and all those who still have at least one more chance.
(“Seventy time seven,” says Jesus,
are the chances we each should have.)

Let the fireman remember his own life as he chops with the axe.
Let neither the minister neglect his wife,
nor the doctor her husband.
Let none of us simply swallow our lives whole.
But if the minister, the doctor, and we should fail,
let us have new years and fresh seasons.
Let us have seventy times seven chances.

*

In 2017, Daniel Simpson and his wife, Ona Gritz, collaborated on two books, co-authoring Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems and co-editing More Challenges for the Delusional, an anthology of prompts, prose, and poetry. His first collection of poems, School for the Blind came out in 2014. The New York Times and numerous poetry magazines have printed his work. The recipient of a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowship, he tends a blog at www.insidetheinvisible.wordpress.com.