noli me tangere
door barbara van male
A New Year
A New Year by Barbara Stewart
I wake
From disturbing dreams
Draw the curtains
To the long blank white page of day
Hoping for a better way
I sit
In my favourite armchair
Facing the window
I stare
Into the pale grey skies
The trees are still and bare
The only movement is of birds
Swooping sea-gulls
The chatter and flutter of a magpie pair
This---a New Year
While twenty-twenty is in ashes
Corona survives
Thrives on our despair and fear
Always near
The damage done
I, for one
Wait in hope
To recover some inner peace and calm
In the days to come
In twenty-twenty-one
Still
In lockdown
A New Year. Finally, the calamitous pandemic year of 2020 is over. But the suffering isn’t. The virus, the despair, the fear, the instability are still here. We are in partial lockdown. The curfew has arrived.
I wrote this English poem on 4 January to get my depressed feelings on paper. The streets were empty. My days feel empty. But I also felt a kind of hope for a new start. Time to recover. Time to regain inner peace and face the future optimistically.
by Barbara Stewart
Next story
Our
partners
