The Year

I love this short but oh-so-truthful jewel of a poem, The Year, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, written back in 1910. For we experience, year after new year, all that she writes about, all the realities of life.

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What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

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The weight of our 2021 year—the good (we did have some, right?) and the bad (no need for the same question) and the we’re-not-sure-which-it-was—now nears its tipping-over point into 2022’s own “rhymes” of a “thousand times.”

May we all “rise up laughing with the light” tomorrow and tomorrow.