I arrived at this celebration with a beginner’s mind
wondering how easy it is for a year to bow out
and still send people into a frenzy.
I have the same body as yesterday, the same hair,
and the time seems to stand still,
except that the clock chimes twelve,
then the crackers shot at my doors and windows.
It’s a weightless weight, a heavy feather, a sigh as rock.
When Our mothers died, we kicked the lights away;
we hammered our fists on their golden coffins,
waking up the dead, harassing the buried,
while our shadows dropped on ignored blessings;
we returned to our roots, refusing to grow.
When our fathers died, we slaughtered our pride,
weeping and lamenting for the good times
that have sunk into the archives.
There is still a debt to pay for lost memory;
there is no need to celebrate the rush of the body
when it returns, it has no rush of blood.
To celebrate the dying of a year is no heroism,
when times past cannot change and start again.
We climbed the mountain and looked down,
threatened to throw our bodies into the valleys
where snakes and spiders might consume us
or rip us apart from the ground we loathed.
Our fathers have licked sour grapes,
and our teeth are set on the edge of the rocks,
yet we want to eat the grass and chew the leaves
until our bodies dry in grief, never to return.
How come now that a year bows out,
we carry fireworks to throw around the city,
our laughter echoes in the towers of churches,
in the plinth of town halls and pinnacles of hotels,
in the tombs of the dead, we invoke witnesses
to join us in the celebration of the death of another hour?
Perhaps we don’t realise what we are doing,
how we laugh at the easing of our life into emptiness,
how we open champagnes for descension into the void,
nudging deeper and deeper into the apocalypse,
where worms, scorpions and vipers will try
our long-preserved reservoir of gladness.
How we celebrate our dying with fanfare
as though there is no more sense in the living,
as though the dissolved nothingness spread on our souls
like swathes of Nutella on brown, toasted bread.