January 2024 Paper Poetry

Tangled in Time

An Inizio Poem

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In the small hours of sunset to sunrise I count and climb 365 steps, tangled up in blues of a swirled starry night.

I seek to reach the peak, I wait for daybreak, I page through mementos. I search for new residents to adorn walls freshly painted in hues of warmth.

I ready, I anticipate, taste the seasons to come, the red-letter days and moments that blur. Yet remembrance threatens to clog my way, to snare my steps in snarls of loss and joy. Chosen photos lean against hall’s wall, await hooks, lost in the fog, stuck in time’s mire.

I’ve started 56 new years. This one, I’m tangled up in blues sown by a life of easy launches new piers, fresh starts.

I’ve danced along ringed steps of skipped stones, jumped to new tracks without a backward glance.

This time, I sit, surrounded: paper clipped notes, fading photos, thank yous and birthday cards, final handwritten words of loves. A thin wisdom, a sandwich of sunset and sunrise, restrains fearful clutch or refusal to let go, blocks avoidance of eye contact with the past.

It’s still there, no less potent in the wake of time’s ferry along distant shores. This thin wisdom, balanced between backward glance and gaze ahead, shimmers, a translucent presence.

Don’t let it become a bulletproof wall to block lessons learned. Instead, use it to sift your time, again and again, to unearth anew that which powers a new start, and unravels the blues.

About this poem: As a kid, I really did think that during the night, we climbed up to the beginning of the next year. I also wondered why we started the new year where it is, instead of on Winter Solstice. That made more sense to me. This poem describes a dreamt blur of my childhood memories of new year’s eve, mixed with this year’s eve, along with some prompts from several sources. I visualized Van Gogh’s “Stary Night” as my landscape.

Thank you to Paper Poetry for the prompt, “Inizio” which means beginnings in Italian, and the phrase “thin wisdom” which found its way into the warp and weft of this poem.