The newest year cannot begin
in January. I knew this
years before the other clans
trotted into my sightline,
before their songs
wafted on cooling winds
towards my sun-pinked ears
and melted into my skin.
I saw the pictures in my head
long before I found the words.
We’d been seed
sprout
blossom.
We fruited.
We loved and were greedy
with each other.
We nurtured and maimed,
were selfless and ruthless,
grown musty.
We beseeched the beings
of wind and earth and air
and G-d,
that they should all know
how we had
given the best in us—Hadn’t we? Had we?
before rotting into hungry earth,
or we married animal mouths,
became cell food and waste
for 2 or 4 or 6 footed ones,
winged ones,
then amorphous tiny ones
that lived well in the dirt.
We rested. Waited.
Reflected, foodless
and without greed.
Willingly parched.
What would become of us
was no longer ours to know, to determine.
We came to realize it never was.
We never were the sovereign queens and kings.
Our assumptions were imperious,
motives often crude and small.
This is what the yielding gave us—
the time to meld humbly with dung,
not to surrender but to relax
at last
into the big decomposition
and wait.
For clarity,
impulse,
instruction.
To be reabsorbed
into the writhing song of life
and open to the eleventh hour
tenth day, cleansed
new song,
new notes
an even
deeper
yearn.
