Different Year Same Baggage

This winter, the New Year has become a trollop of time.
An indecent excuse for the changing of the year.
It violates our thoughts with despair and declension,
This calamity of illness, a contentious infection.
The brave face, a stout heart, none can turn it away,
It is earned, bought with the coin of ignorance.
Its festered soul nurtured by social pestilence.
The nations great shamans are lacking a cure,
Burying their heads in tribal hoodoo voodoo.
All opportunity to soar above dyscrasia, squandered,
Wasted on petty dogma and personal convictions.
The world waits, groaning at humankind’s confusion,
City on the Hill eagles have fallen from the skies,
There is no one left to teach them how to fly.
A year just begun, its inheritance, last year’s baggage.

2023, Donald C Harbour

The wheel of the year

There is sleep in the air,
rustling leaves begin to fall,
the sagging eyelids of the season.
Each day a crispness awakens,
it heralds other subtle changes,
rest for the land, flowers, lakes.
The cleansing purgatory of snow
gathers its chemistry in the north.
The gentle breeze whispers: “Quiet now,”
the hush is Mother Nature’s cool touch
upon the frantic fevered cheek of summer.
Human hearts yearn for this time,
they cling to past ancient old ways,
a quickening yearning for the hearth,
harvested fields, ducks on the fly.
Goddesses lurk in the shadows,
Modron and Olwen lean into their work,
shouldering, turning the wheel of the year.
Sages know only spring and autumn hold love,
the dawn and twilight of seasons,
the spiritual recharging of all life.
Smoke rises from a distant chimney,
it has comfort in its languid message,
a temple incense carrying prayers.
In the living is the solitary knowledge
that with the ending of the year awaits
creation’s glorious beginnings,
the only promise winter gives up.

©2015, Donald Harbour

Someone had to do it

You know, I watch her pass,
Another year gasping, choking,
Swollen and bloated in death.

Eventually, becoming a useless thing,
Her piquant posture lost luster,
Now a bag-lady beggar on the street.

A year, dancing across life’s stage,
High kicks to her coming morbidity,
A has been chorus girl with no tutu.

Resolutely, I ponder her lost youth,
Preparing her fish-net hose lined grave,
I wonder what I ever saw in her.

©2013, Donald Harbour