Hail and Happy New Year (2004): Come What May

As It Were

As year begins, with light weight of our miniverse,
I chime these lines in hopeful wish to hold
(But not to pray) that nothing, surely nothing, worse
Than thunder peals and lessened death is tolled.
Neruda sang that Spring will come again
At the end of his biography, an old echo
Of the turning leaf, the flowering up from earth,
From the ravines and wells of Chilean women,
Of melting into air of slogging snow,
The budding bells of compassioned mirth.

Though the carp in ponds are silent,
Mésanges with spectrum-feathered wings
Warble in the albizzia, as their intelligent
Dismay rings the gray-cold air and sings
Small notes against the fearful bluster,
Resists contagion of fostered fear,
Glides above the limbic thermal hate,
And seeks with celestial sense to muster
Resonant content in this terrestrial year.

So on the orbits circle years, day and night,
With unschooled fish consuming sleep,
Where birds of prey do the thing that's right
And children learn that comic colors bleed,
We either see the farce or sense of force,
The buried hero, the emperor of pre-emption,
The bomb that kills the water-gathering girls,
The common sense of keeping thinking coarse,
All blurring whirling weeks and quotidian attention,
Knitted on a ball where the absurd river purls.

Stay the coarse,
Bell the cat,
And feed the birds;
Keep your powder wry.
Come what May,
Hey nonny nonny,
Spring will come,
Hey nonny nay,
By and by.

Warmly,

Michael Emmet Sean Patrick O'Grady

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