Hope for the New Year

This past year has been a tough one in so many ways. I don't need to recount them.

However, I to offer you a few messages of hope for the new year through some poems by some of my favorite authors.

I hope you enjoy them. Leave a message with your favorite poems or quotes to share with us.

Birdsong

Birdsong brings relief

to my longing

I'm just as ecstatic as they are,

but with nothing to say!

Please universal soul, practice

some song or something through me!

— Rumi, 13th century Persian poet

You Will Remember

You will remember that leaping stream where sweet aromas rose and trembled, and sometimes a bird, wearing water and slowness, its winter feathers.

You will remember those gifts from the earth: indelible scents, gold clay, weeds in the thicket and crazy roots, magical thorns like swords.

You'll remember the bouquet you picked, shadows and silent water, bouquet like a foam-covered stone.

That time was like never, and like always. So we go there, where nothing is waiting; we find everything waiting there.

— Pablo Neruda, 20th century Chilean Poet

The Ponds

Every year

the lilies

are so perfect

I can hardly believe

their lapping light crowding the black,

mid-summer ponds.

Nobody could count all of them—

the muskrats swimming

can reach out and touch

only so many, they are that

rife and wild.

But what in this world

is perfect?

I bend closer and see

how this one is clearly lopsided--

and that one wears an orange blight--

and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away--

and that one is a slumped purse

full of its own

unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life

is to be willing

to be dazzled--

to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even

to float a little

above this difficult world.

I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--

that the light is everything--that it is more than the sum

of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

And shouldn't we all?

— Mary Oliver from House of Light (1990), a 20th century American poet