More time, more time.

 Year's End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   

And held in ice as dancers in a spell   

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   

Composedly have made their long sojourns,   

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze   

The random hands, the loose unready eyes   

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

                                                                        ---Richard Wilbur

                                                         from New and Collected Poems

        I posted this poem seven years ago. It's one I read in December and January every year, and I should know it by heart by now but can't seem to get past "a settlement of snow."  Next year, maybe I will know to "monument."

    In the dim morning light, newly fallen snow reflects back into the window near me.  All is silence in the New Year, yet there's a buzz and crackle of possibility as I look at my new planner, and a satisfaction as I shelve the full pages of 2025.  My word this year is fearless, and my motto is mastery of, resistance to fear (Thank you, Sam Clemens).  I have goals and plans, and the wisdom to hold them loosely.  What will 2026 bring?

    May God guide and bless us as each new day of 2026 unfolds!