Some Words for the New Year

The Widow's Toast

Specters move like pilot flames
Their widows toast at St. Angel
Better times collide with now
The tears were warm, I feel them still
Their heat to vapor and disperse
and cloud our eyes with weary glaze

You raise your glass and may exclaim
"I'll put my hands on the truth, my God!"
But its faster, love, than you and me
Faster than the speed of gravity
That's how it catches you from falling
And how it always slips away

Specters move like pilot flames
Their widows toast at St. Angel
Better times collide with now
and better times
Better times are coming still.

Neko Case



The Rhodora

On being asked, whence is the flower.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in the damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
and court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose,
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson