On the cusp of 2020, this week’s poem welcomes us into the intricate bright work, the undoing and the doing, of releasing the past year and meeting the new. Here’s to plenty of beauty and delight on all of our paths into the year.
Born in the Bronx, the son of German immigrants, Richard Foerster is the author of eight poetry collections, the most recent of which is “Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems.” For the last 33 years, he has lived on the coast of southern Maine.
Invitation to a New Year
By Richard Foerster
Glassed in, here at the edge
of my stony Atlantic, come watch
the opposites commingle and expire –
the braidings of chimneys, sea-wraiths
tangoing till extinction – and let
the raveled years unthread.
Let’s recompose the world’s clatter –
make it shimmer like Ravel.
But ah, the burden of this light, ice
fallen from the eaves, the brittle fire
of that promised star. Yet come,
let’s clear the path.
Megan Grumbling is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Invitation to a New Year” copyright © 2019 by Richard Foerster, reprinted from Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems, published by Tiger Bark Press. It appears by permission of the author.
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