New Year's Day


     Day ONE yawns.
     Its cavernous throat fire-cracks open
     midnight wide, deep, dark
     unknown and unexpected as the turning point of pain
     grown familiar, suddenly hinting at reprieve.
     The sun has upended on the east
     probably peach-pink in the early hours before waking
     those same colours of yesterday’s leave-taking
     when my heart turned grey-blue karst
     skidding along an empty strand
     pulse flapping on gull wings, the silence matted
     with the prospect of migration into a new year.

     It draws the most reticent mind forward
     the most determined, the most depressed
     the way it unleashes all those bubbles
     of bottled past onto the still calm of a wintery slate
     auguring promise amidst the infinite banalities
     of an otherwise ordinary day.


     Anamaría Crowe Serrano