New Year's Eve 2016

Year's end 
and I've been thinking of Yeat's poem 
"The Second Coming" 
and the final lines: 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

But I keep hearing this instead:

...Slouches towards Washington to be born...

*

Recently I found a file of miscellaneous poems in my computer. 

Last week, I posted one written on the Solstice, 
2012.

But I also found one from New Year's Eve, 
2011.

Here it is:  

New Year’s Eve

   A lone black mullein stalk in a snow field.

Dipped in tallow it becomes a torch.

The past, an illusion. And yet here it is, all around:

Shadows of standing stones.

I close my eyes. Leftover oak leaves rustle.

When I open my eyes, white pines have risen from the earth.

Happy New Year!

*************

Meanwhile

Entropy

 

has a call-list from magazines that are doing versions of 

NOT MY PRESIDENT issues.

See below:

"Post-Election Calls for Submissions:

While this list will remain static, calls for submissions related to the election will be regularly posted and updated in the Art/Writing section of Entropy’s Trumpwatch."

Anti-Heroin Chic / Deadline: January 20, 2017 / Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, Visual Art

Banango Street – Issue 13: Respond / Now / Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, Translations

Cleaver Magazine – Life As Activism / Now / Fiction, Flash Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry

Dryland – Poets In Unity: Responses to the Election of Donald Trump / Now / Poetry

Fathom Books – PYRAMIDS GROW OUT OF OUR PAIN: poems + essays of the #nevertrump resistance / Deadline: December 31, 2016 / Poems, Essays

Gravel – Trumped Up Blog / Now / Nonfiction, Poetry, Flash Fiction, Art

Heavy Feather Review – #NotMyPresident / Year-Round / Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Journalism, Comics, Hybrids

Mizna – Surviving the Rhetoric: Arabs & Muslims as Villains, Again / Deadline: February 28, 2017 / Prose, Poetry

Mount Analogue / Now / Political Pamphlets

Rise Up Review / Now / Poetry

States of the Union / Deadline: January 27, 2017 / Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, Art

Us For President  / Now / Poetry, Prose, Art, Spoken Word

VIDA Review – Where Do We Go From Here / Now / Essays

Yes Poetry – #NotTrump Series / Now / Poetry

NYC

Winter Solstice Poem 2016

Midway through life's journey, I found myself
In a dark wood, the straight road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard--so tangled and rough

And savage -- that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well…

Purgatorio/Dante

I've been thinking all week about why the darkest time of the year is usually the most creative for me. And I got to thinking about a Solstice, four years ago, 2012, when I was living in the Woodstock, New York area. I had been sad, grief-stricken, for months. This was during a time of immense psychic upheaval and every morning, every evening, the circumstances of my life ground my face in the same question: What have you done with your life? The answer terrified me.

The night of the solstice, I borrowed a car and went driving in the mountains. And got lost. The silhouettes of the mountains all around me, glimpsed through the dark weave of bare branches roadside, felt ominous, full of mockery. I could hear a mocking voice inside me: "Where are you? Where are you?" The question wasn't about geography. 

I finally stopped the car, got out, and stood in the middle of the road, looked up at the thin ribbon of stars between the thick canopy of bare trees lining both sides of the road. And, for a second, I felt the space - that immense space - across the stars; felt the space between my own body and the bodies of the trees nearby; and felt the space inside my own body.

I got back in the car and, eventually, found my way back to the flea-infested apartment where I lived. The same desperate question - what have you done with your life? - was still there…but I was also strangely calm.

I composed this quick poem in my head on the drive back, wrote it down when I got home, then promptly forgot it until I opened a file marked "Miscellaneous" about a month ago. It has no title.

Lost

for over an hour

on these mountain roads

(Where are the signs?

There should be more signs.)

An oak leaf skips across macadam. Sudden

                                                            shadow-thing,

tumbling for a second in the headlights, blown

dark to dark. Pleiades above,

                                                   Jupiter so bright

        the light rings out

Leaf.

Man.

Star.

Small things.

Have a Strangely Beautiful

and Beautifully Strange

Solstice!

Other winter solstice poems (the ghosts of winter solstice past) can be found below:

Winter Solstice 2011

December Poem 2014  

Winter Solstice 2015