May Saron: New Year Resolve

The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.
Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.
Let silence in.
She will rarely mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.
For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.
 

 — May Saron

From The Silence Now – New and Uncollected 

Earlier Poems
 

Mary Oliver: Starlings In Winter

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

 

they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

 

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

 

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

 

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

 

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

 

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

 

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

 

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

 

— Mary Oliver