New Year's Day

I sent the following tanka as New Year greetings to various colleagues and email lists. Jane Reichhold asked to publish it as a sequence in Lynx, so of course I said yes.

New Year's Dawn

a fresh leaf
white in the winter
of a new year;
it seems a shame
to mar it with words

Donald Keene
shares my cup of tea
this new morning
we talk about the death
of tyrants and of poetry

raw and painful
this old blister;
if only our hurts
would change with
the calendar

this journal,
bound in black,
a suitable coffin
for all the words
I have written

cold it is,
and colder still,
this dawn in
a new year
in an old house

in a few hours
I must face the sun—
without the grace
of age or humor,
but only memory

do they wake
to new hope
or old despair,
so many poor people
in this spinning world?

on this new day,
the iron cricket
doesn’t sing

~K~