Good Image!

 New Year's

by Dana Gioia

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,
Pretending that we live the present moment.
But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,
This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now
Be our true habitat? The present is
The leaky palm of water that we skim
From the swift, silent river slipping by.

The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along—to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.

     Something about it being New Year's Day with no obligations prompted me to take Trygve on a longer walk today. While the snow makes walking a bit more difficult the reward is that the snow records the activity of wildlife.  There was a place in the grassland where a deer spent time grazing on the grass. It's not far from a large field of standing corn in a state wildlife area. Apparently the deer wanted to supplement a diet of corn with some salad.

     Near some cattails, at the edge of a water impoundment, pheasants had been so active that the snow was all beaten down. Cattails are a pheasant hotel in winter weather. No matter how hard the wind blows if the cattail patch is large pheasants be totally protected from the wind. With adequate food and protection from wind pheasants can easily survive the coldest days.  On that piece of land I've constructed five dams to create wetlands that allow cattails to survive...a hotel for wildlife.  The long walk was rewarded with the sighting of many pheasants, none of which came home with me.

      "A field of snow without a single footprint."  Isn't that a good image for a new year?  Here we are on January 1, 2021, a new year, like a field of snow  untrampled. It is a gift for us to use, for what?  Perhaps as R. T. Clark, BBC home news editor, said during World War II, "To tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible."  Garner's Quotations,  P. 13.

Takk for alt,

Al

"Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us."  😎 Ryan Scott on Twitter, Garner's Quotations, P. 13