New Year by Joanna Klink

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend February 21, 2017   New Year   Joanna Klink

We woke to the darkness before our eyes, unable to take the measure of the loss. Who are they. What are we. What have we    abandoned to arrive with such violence at this hour. In answer we drew back, covered our ears with our hands to the heedless victory, or vowed,    as I did, into the changed air, never to consent. But it was already too late, too late for the unfarmed fields, the men by the station, the park swings, the parking lots,    the ground water, the doves—too late for dusk falling in summer, chains of glass lakes    mingled into dawn, the corals, the neighbors, the first drizzle on an empty street, cafeterias and stockyards, young men asking twice a day for    work. Too late for hope. Too far along to meet a country, a people, its annihilating need.   Because the year is new and the great change already underway, we concede a thousandfold    and feel, harder than the land itself, a complicity for everything we did not see or comprehend: cynicism borne of raw despair, long-cultivated hatreds, the promises of leaders traveling like cool silence through the dark. My life is here, in this small room, and like you    I am waiting to know—but there is no time to wait for what has happened. What does the future ask of me, those who won't have enough to eat by evening, those whose disease will now take hold—    and the decades that carry past me once I've died, generations of children, the suffering that is never solved, the heat over the earth, its marshes,    its crowded towers, its unbreathable night air. I would open my hand from the wrist, step outside, not lose nerve. Here is the day, still to be lived. We do not fully know what we do. But the trains depart the stations, traffic lurches    and stalls, a highway crew has paused. Desert sun softens the first color of the rock. Who governs now governs by grievance and old scores,    but we compass our worth, prepare to do the work not our own, and feel, past the scorn in his eyes, the burden in the torso of a stranger, draw close to the sick,    the weak, the women without jobs, the twelve-year-old facing spite half-tangled into sleep, the panic tightening inside everyone who has been told to go, I will help you although I do not know you, and strive not to look away, be unwilling to profit,    an ache inside that endless effort, a slowed-down summons not from those whose rage is lit by greed—we do not consent— but the ones who wake without prospect, those who don't speak, cannot recover,    like the old woman at the counter, the helpless father who, like you, gets no more than his one life.            Copyright © 2017 Joanna Klink. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "Since the election I've been feeling, like so many others, physically overwhelmed at the magnitude of what is about to be dismantled in my country, what is about to be taken away from very real people already barely able to get by. In writing the poem I was trying to sense a way forward through my own demoralizing hopelessness, trying to clarify what I need to do, and—with the 'we'—be reminded of what's still possible." —Joanna Klink   Joanna Klink is the author of Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (Penguin Books, 2015). She lives in Missoula, Montana.   Photo credit: Antonia Wolf Poetry by Klink   Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (Penguin Books, 2015)  "Let Them Not Say" by Jane Hirshfield "Air In The Epic" by Brenda Hillman "Self-Portrait in Charleston, Orlando" by Dean Rader Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. If you enjoy Poem-a-Day, please consider making a donation to help make it possible. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038