After the first step into the New Year

“we write past, present and future
find possibilities in words
but we cannot swim like dolphins
or swoop and dive like birds”
               from ‘Being Human’ by Kim M. Russell

I couldn’t wait for the end of it
after so much worry and disenchantment,
and longed to say goodbye to it
all year long. Planets out of alignment,
illness took the shine off it,
and there was no chance of atonement.
The past year held me down like stones
in my pockets, poured lead into my bones.

But I’m ready to embrace the new,
the unknown and the unexpected,
like dolphins diving in the blue,
the love of those with whom I’m connected
by words, magic and striving to renew –
fresh and bold and unaffected.
The new year holds hope and promise
like feathered wings of solace.

Kim M. Russell, 9th January 2025

Image by Jonas Von Werne on Unsplash

Laura is our host for the first dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar of 2025, with the theme: New and Old in a Palinode. She starts her prompt with a lovely quotation from Christina Rosetti.

Laura says that January is “the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and transitions, past and future, looking back to the known and forward to the unknown”, and has given us an example of the past year ‘like a death, gone, finished and cremated’ in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, ‘Burning the Old Year’, and a lively dance poem by Elder Olson’s dance poem: ‘Pavane for the New Year’.

We are not only exploring new and old, but we are doing this in a palinode of two stanzas (numbered or even subtitled) with a minimum of nine lines and an equal number of lines per stanza, in which one verse holds contrary views/feelings/proposals/arguments etc. to the other, and meter and rhyme is optional.

We should choose one of the lines Laura has given as an epigraph to prompt our poems’ view and contrary view or, if we have already written on the theme of past and future at any time, we can revisit it for this palinode and perhaps use a couple of lines from it as Epigraph (with link reference).

25 thoughts on “After the first step into the New Year”

  3. I love how you carry the imagery of the epigraph into your poem, Kim. The first verse’s leaden weight gives way to that “note of possibilities” that enchants like “dolphins diving in the blue”! That’s surely the way to begin the new year on “feathered wings of solace.” Thumbs up to that!

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  9. You portray the heaviness of the old year with the contrast of a lighter flow. Am not sure how the effect works on me but certainly your words combine to make the emotions and yes your rhyming seems subtle but creates the poetic impact. Hope 2025 is a ‘lighter’ year for you. Certainly for me 2023 was the heavy one and 2024 much better. Now, we wait and see how all unfolds.

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