Dimly Perceived: A Poem For The New Year

This will be no fairy tale, although many will take refuge in make-believe and invent a wall between this true story and their perception of things. They will assume the details can be indefinitely shaped and reshaped as their hearts desire it to be. And when things stubbornly choose to be fixed in the worst possible shape of destiny, they go even deeper into their illusions, and find the truth of things blocking further descent, where mind and reality meet, merge and mold their unity. Perhaps philosophers will rejoice at this purity of results, novelists will seek out plot patterns and representative characters to act in concert. Poets will, at first, indulge in song and sense in the most basic awareness of the new reality, but the best among them will soon - in a triumph of insight or an accident of wisdom - find the words that will compel us to make this new world familiar, as if we have always been native to its time and place. Poets have long been schooled in such a unity of hope and necessity. What we dimly perceive in these early days will be illuminated soon enough and it will then be common place. Oh, may the wonder of these new things flourish! Count yourselves blessed to be of use to the poets and their visions!