Gonna read three or more poems.
This one's called "For the Year,"
and we're just past the turn of the year.
"If I did not know, I could not tell
by watching the blue sky with not a cloud moving across it
in the still morning above the flying songs of the thrushes,
that in these unseen hours of clear daylight, one more
year even now is leaving us.
One more year, one more decade, wherever it is that they go,
once they have been here.
And we waited up for them.
I stood in a friend's house high on a hill looking out
over the city to the sea 10 years ago.
And my ears rang with the midnight.
Fireworks rising from the lit streets
into that time with its stars.
My hair was still dark.
I did not know you.
And in the morning, both the puppies barked,
and the tiles had come for the new roof we are living under.
It is already a year now since we sat here with friends
by candlelight, talking of childhoods risen
at last from hiding until we saw that the candles had burned
past the moment we had been waiting for,
and already it had slipped through our words and hands
and was gone.
And the year was new without our having
seen how it happened, bringing with it far
from our sight, this whole day wherever
it is going now as we watch it together here in the morning."