New Year’s eve!

Here is a fragment of a poem, Nothing New by Richard Greene:

The world doesn’t stop at midnight
like a train changing engineers.
There’s no bump in the road of time.
The scene hasn’t changed.
The characters remain the same.
The play goes on as before.
Dramatic climax is no more likely
at this moment than any other.
There isn’t even an intermission.
A foot raised at the end of one year
comes down the next
with no pause in between.

But, as the planet circles its star,
at a certain point in its orbit
where it’s arbitrarily said to have started,
humans bellow and hug their fellows,
as if this carousel hadn’t gone around
a few billion times before.

Why this fragment of Greene’s poem, you may well ask.  These lines say what I have in mind to say in better words than I could manage.  The expression is sufficient, and more would me too much.  If you’d like to enjoy the entire poem CLICK HERE.

Whatever your custom for marking the New Year, by all means take pleasure in the meaning of the experience.  Our plans are to visit a new-to-us restaurant in Geneva.  Afterward we are likely to turn in before the stroke of midnight.  Others already are celebrating in Sydney, Australia.  There the calendar page has  turned.

Whatever your plans, laugh at yourself.  Is it not humanizing to join with others to mark time?

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The song?  This story by Shakespeare is wonderfully interpreted by Dire Straits, Romeo and Juliet…

Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start

All I do is keep the beat, the bad company
All I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme
Juliet, I’d do the stars with you any time