Happy New Year everyone.
I was asked by my partner David if I have any resolutions for 2025, and I answered blithely and perhaps rather shallowly, ‘Have more fun!’. But this throwaway response is actually quite serious in intent, it is saying something important about always have things to look forward to, to have mental and physical space where things can happen, and where one can perhaps meditate a little. Time to ponder, in short.
Only the other afternoon I was walking the dog home and was able to witness one of the spectacular sunsets that winter can sometimes offer us. The blazing sky mixed in with telephone lines and Victorian roofs said something about my life in the glorious city that has been my home for the last fifty-four years.
And then I thought of the first new sonnet in my upcoming collection and what it is trying to say, setting out a writer’s manifesto, and an intention that I will do very my best to stick to. Perhaps a poem about sunsets might be the first of the new year’s growth.
This Resolution
This resolution to write more, to chase
Away the shadows, comes with fear.
I hope for a kindly, creative space
Where I can heal myself, where I can dare
To think and write again, to cast off
The fractures of the past, or celebrate
Their complex patterns, the tightly woven stuff
Of a lived life, that can chafe and fret.
For it comes with dangers, the possibility
Of a dark alley mugging, the bruised skin
And the traps of a past life that I can’t foresee
That might not free but chain my nightmares in.
But I will try to keep this promise that I give
And explore the life I’ve had, and now live.
