Home...

Looking back on the last day of my first term back in school, I can hardly believe that it was only a short 4 months ago that I moved to this new place I call home now. But is isn't quite home yet. Even though this wondrous city has welcomed me ever so warmly, and charmed me in more ways than I had imagined; despite the many highs and ample firsts of the term that went by, I have to admit I haven't looked forward to going back home and to family quite as much in many years as I have these last few weeks. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I had fervently wished for a year to end and for a new one to begin either.
In years past, the end of a year would bring with it a sense of wonder at everything the year gone by had brought with it, and a twinge of sadness even at time's relentless march, quickly churning through the present to the recent past, and just as quickly to a more distant one. But not so this year. I am ready to flip the page, and kindle the dying embers back to a burning fire, bright with hope and cheer.
Somehow, knowing that I will be in the familiar comfort of home as I watch the year trickle down to its very last minute makes the wait seem bearable. Oh, 2011! despite everything you have taken, I am thankful for the smidgeon of courage and hope you have left behind. And thankful too, that you've spared me a few precious days to savour the pleasure of fingering the shape of words in my head with much reading, and even some writing. In closing, I offer you, these...

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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