New Year Poem 2001

I await the coming of the new year
As I await the coming of a lover
Who has been away a month
but it seems a year

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I have been here
Half a hundred years
And before me my father
And before him, his
But the future is my lover

3

One thousand years have touched
the sleep of the boy I was
Who selpt before the sea
Under a mirror

Even now in my sleep
Lightning strikes the glass
And my mother, lamp in hand
Goes around the house
As if searching for something in the dark
        Then the rain on the dry tiles

4

The lightning strikes
and plays on the edges of the sky
As light around the edges of a photograph
whose heart is dark

Why did not the lightning gently pass
that fateful night a 1000 years ago
when Christ was crucified

At least the wind is kind
It blew his name to the far corners of the earth
Yet the earthworms are blind

5

I leave the door open
for the year like my lover to enter

Sometimes he is the honoured guest
And sometimes my heart is dark
I cannot find the spark
to re-ignite an unfinished conversation

6

The world is my body
His body
My body upon his body
The world's body

7

The look we exchange
Sometimes
Is the look the lamb exchanges
With the butcher who sharpens the knife

Lightning!
Lightly pass over my house tonight
Do spare
this world its extinction, another year

8

And a boy in Kashmir dies
An innocent lamb
whose blood dyed the grass

9

A man and a woman walk to the end of night
A man, a woman and a friend walk to the end of night
They are the star, the treetop, the sky
Freedom is always for the one who thinks differently
Freedom is only for the one who thinks differently
We all were to be free
But we feel the pull of the chain
        We hear the cry.


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