Of living despite the mess of us...

In my first column for the year, I’d like to tell you about one of my plans for 2025. It is to learn the classic New Year song, “Should auld acquaintance be forgotten, and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?” Traditionally sung on Hogmanay or New Year’s Eve, it is meant to highlight times gone past. The tune I am familiar with. The words, not so much. I do not know who wrote this classic Scottish folk song that takes its words from poet Robert Burns’ work, but I watched Rod Stewart render it in his raspy, instantly recognisable voice, and it moved me. I thought about people who are not part of 2025, who have left or have been left bereft.

And that’s the thing with the new year. It is a moment of nostalgia and hope, no matter the circumstances. Of course, there are those who treat December 31 like any other day, but for even the most cynical amongst us — and I count myself among them — the beginning of a new year fills us with possibilities. As Mary Oliver says in ‘Morning Poem’, each day can be filled with purpose. “Every morning/ the world/ is created. Under the orange/ sticks of the sun/ the heaped/ ashes of the night/ turn into leaves again”

The new year has been a popular topic for poets, old and new. As is the case with the times we live in, the poems are suffused with philosophical ideas about mortality, dreams, and what it means to be profoundly human. Japanese poet Bashoō wrote one of the most celebrated nengajo — New Year cards: “New Year’s Day— each thing that meets the eye becomes a flower”

Unsurprisingly, this haiku comes from a civilisation that holds hanami parties to celebrate flowering trees. Everything we see becomes as beautiful as a flower because we feel such optimism when the year unfolds.

Speaking of hope, there’s Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells.’ I read somewhere that it is the most-quoted New Year poem, and it makes sense. “Ring out the old/ ring in the new/ Ring, happy bells/ across the snow: The year is going/ let him go/ Ring out the false/ ring in the true.”

That’s another thing I want to focus on this year — separating truth from fiction and understanding who is a well-wisher and who is not. It’s easier said than done — in the hyperconnected world we live in, our actions have a ripple effect and carry us off in a riptide we don’t always create.

In a conversation with a friend last year, he mentioned how every person he’d met had talked of how awful 2024 had been for them. We took some joy in that; misery loves company, and so on. If you’ve had a horrible year, may I offer you the ever-present kindness of Ada Limón? The current US poet laureate tells us in her poem, ‘Instructions on Not Giving Up,’ “Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,/ I’ll take it, the tree seems to say,/ a new slick leaf/unfurling like a fist to an open palm,/ I’ll take it all.”

Isn’t healing like that? A slow process that requires patience that is purposeful and rewarding? There is no drama in healing, just quiet perseverance. Could I perhaps treat each moment as a miracle and find solace? Or should I be stoic and treat 2025 like Ogden Nash does in ‘Good Riddance, But Now What?’

Come, children, gather round my knee;/Something is about to be./Tonight’s December thirty-first,/Something is about to burst./The clock is crouching, dark and small,/Like a time bomb in the hall./Hark! It’s midnight, children dear. /Duck! Here comes another year.”

I shall take the year to find out.

World in Verse is a monthly column on the best of new (and old) poetry. The writer is a poet, teacher, voice actor and speaker. She has published two collections of poetry. Send your thoughts to her at [e-mail]