January 6: Better or Worse, Margaret Avison, "New Year's Poem"

On this sixth day of January in the year of our Lord 2017, the members of the Congress of the United States of America certified the results of last November's presidential election.  Donald John Trump will be the next President of the United States, for better or worse.  Not that there was any doubt.

Now, you are probably expecting me to go on some rant, being a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.  I am not going to do that.  That does not mean I am defeated or resigned.  That does not mean that I accept any of the tenets of a Donald Trump presidency.  I can't do that.  For the next four years, I will have to watch the lunacy unfold and hope against Armageddon.

I am an American.  I have a daughter who will face inequality in the work place.  I have a son who needs expensive ADHD medication from an unchecked pharmaceutical industry.  Ditto my wife with bipolar meds.  My sister has Down's syndrome and survives on Social Security disability.  I don't think that all Syrian refugees are Muslim terrorists, and I don't think that all illegal Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers.  I believe Black lives matter, and I believe that law enforcement lives matter, too.

I believe that you don't have to agree with me, and I will still love and respect and accept you.  I hope you will do the same.

That is Saint Marty's New Year's hope for everyone.

New Year's Poem

by:  Margaret Avison

The Christmas twigs crispen and needles rattle

Along the window-ledge.

             A solitary pearl

Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party

Lies in the suety, snow-luminous plainness

Of morning, on the window-ledge beside them.   

And all the furniture that circled stately

And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed

With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver

Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses

Into its previous largeness.

             I remember   

Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave

Where cold so little can contain;

I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones

Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust,

And the long loop of winter wind

Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus down

To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard,

And the still window-ledge.

             Gentle and just pleasure

It is, being human, to have won from space

This unchill, habitable interior

Which mirrors quietly the light

Of the snow, and the new year.