There is a new poem of mine up at Verse-Virtual called “New Year’s Eve”. It’s the first poem I wrote in 2019, and I wrote in on New Year’s morning. I figured if I could crank out a poem with a slight hangover, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad year after all.

The poem was suggested to me while watching my daughter and her friend playing among the smoking ruins of neighborhood fireworks. Where we live, people set off their own outside their homes, in the streets, cheap and awful-smelling contraptions that create a haze and sting the eyes. But the girls’ curiosity was as if an alien spacecraft had just crash-landed in the backyard. That interested me more than the bright lights.

New Year’s Eve

Tonight we watched the lanterns rise
up through the black and flinty air
as neon blossoms lit the skies.
We squinted in the smoky glare

of cheap contraptions struck & burned
like matchsticks in the littered street.
A pinwheel sputtered, lifted, turned
about, a pyrotechnic feat

of ancient alchemy – it flew
a foot or two, then comically
crashed in a plot of grass, where two
children approached it cautiously

as if it were a UFO
portending unknown auguries
or sizzling in the afterglow
of unavoidable demise.