A Deep River Year
December 31,  2014

There is nothing special about this day, really.  In the life of the planet, it is just another turn, one which completes a single orbit around our small star.  The life here goes on as it did yesterday.   The sparrows chattering in the forsythia bush along the edge of the yard know nothing about a new year.  They will not be making resolutions or wondering what news will shatter their peace.   They will scuttle around under the feeders for stray seed and huddle together in the cold night and wait for dawn, as they did yesterday.

But we are different.   We mark time on calendars, remember the numbered years of our lives.  We come to this night hoping to a find a doorway to something new, different.  No matter that the earth is getting warmer, or that human creatures still seem to try to solve their problems with violence, or that the shadows of death hang over everything we love.   We hold our breath, and in the pause, believe in goodness. 

Today I arise before dawn and take two dogs out for their morning walk.     Our feet crunch through the fallen leaves as we climb a hill behind the cemetery; and then in a grassy meadow I stop while the dogs go sniffing in the bushes.   I am suddenly aware of the silence all around me.   There is not the breath of a wind, and the world seems to stand stock-still.   But I listen closely and hear a barely discernible distant sound.   It is a hum--perhaps the drone of cars speeding past on a highway, I think.  Or is it inside me, the throb and pulse of blood pushing through my arteries, the thing giving me life?   Or the primal thrum of the universe, the music of the spheres?    A dog barks down the street, and overhead somewhere a hawk cries, hungry for morning, and the quiet returns.   It is a sweet silence, this.   The world, my world, holding its breath, as something new waits just over the hill.

The End of the Year
 
Sparrows chatter
to greet this cold morning,
and I fling a handful of seed
across the barren ground.
Months from now
I will kneel here,
lay seeds in fallow earth
so that something green might grow.
But now the seed is gift,
a tender offering to the feathered ones,
tossed into the doorway of the year
as hope and promise
that we will make it through
this looming winter together.
Somewhere fireworks splash across the sky,
and lovers kiss away their fears,
a road curves off into a new year
as infants sleep beneath wishful stars.
But I will walk on frozen earth
and pause to listen to my heartbeat,
which is today a song of gratitude
that I am here
in this wonder of a life
where birds still sing,
where  sunrise turns the sky
into a rose.

--Timothy Haut, December 31, 2014