A Poem for a Year's Ending

By Michael Parker Days have flown quickly by like fearsome comets. Here then gone; here then gone. My hair is colored moonlight. My bones are brittle as the limbs of the trees cracking from the touch of winter’s deepening freeze. If I could disclose a secret, it is suffering has visited me like an old friend. But if there is anything I know, if there is something I want to pass on after a year, it would be this: the remains of my yesterdays shall be steps I take in my tomorrows— emboldened memories, flying aspirations, lessons administered like sacrament, perseverance practiced like a holy mantra, convictions adhered to like Grecian marble, and hope rooted like mountains. It is true. What I have lost has broken me, what I have learned, I do not want to leave behind. I aspire to the patience of the moon through her long cycles, seeing all our joy and all our dark history. I know tomorrow is the best theory of probability— a gamble with life, with the Fates who weave my hours and days through patterns of the living and the dead. I aspire to listen to where the ancients are— at the windstorm’s end in that invisible country now glowing in the widening skies. I know I am master of the ship and all strive to maneuver through the maelstrom and settle the spirit down through raging storms. My hope for the new year— settle down, wild storms, settle down. Copyright © 2021 by Michael Parker. Originally published in the poetry collection, Diving the Spirits in the House of the Hush and Hush, by Michael Parker, published by the Utah State Poetry Society, 2021.