A new year's blessing

From our own poet of the woods, LIsa Shatzky:

Had we one more day 

it would not be stuffing envelopes 

to save the world, 

citing love as our reason 

for feasting on romanticized 

atrocities in the nightly news 

(which are still atrocities, cold 

and ordinary, come morning) 

and believing 

that if we analyzed and dissected 

our suffering long and hard 

enough and set up camps 

in stations of the lost 

and joined the victims 

and survivors and born 

again wounded, 

some kind of healing 

would happen. 

Oh, perhaps some good came of all that 

learning and unlearning the languages 

of sorrow which hung heavy 

around our necks and cut 

deeply in our lips, 

but had we one more day 

I imagine we might have 

chosen instead the laughing 

geese above us and their gawking 

lamentations 

at the melodramas 

we made. 

Under the cedars we might have 

lingered, graced by slowness 

of breath and the utter importance 

of the hummingbird 

and petals from delicate 

flowers falling 

with the fragile forgiveness 

of the seasons 

and the godliness of laughter 

and the tenacity of the beating heart 

carrying on without needing 

to know why. 

As remarkable as finding ourselves 

awake, at last, trembling 

and seeing each other 

for the first time. 

lisa shatzky (published in The New Quarterly, 2010, and Simple Praise,2009) 

Happy New Year Bowen Islanders, you irrascible, joyous, generous, garrolous, irritating, humourous, faithful, caring, bunch of humans.