Tonight a year ends.
Some will see it out tooting and hollering.
Not us.
My wife's already in bed
and I'll join her there soon.
Were it not for this poem
I'd be in my armchair reading,
my eyelids succumbing to gravity,
and my head may yet be on its pillow
before the clamorous hour.
 
Suppose there were no years.
Would anything be different?
We think important things have ended and begun
when it's only a matter of digits on a calendar,
perhaps some resolutions,
largely to be unfulfilled,
or the earth beginning
another of its innumerable circuits around the sun.
 
The world doesn't stop at midnight
like a train changing engineers.
There's no bump in the road of time.
The scene hasn't changed.
The characters remain the same.
The play goes on as before.
Dramatic climax is no more likely
at this moment than any other.
There isn't even an intermission.
A foot raised at the end of one year
comes down the next
with no pause in between.
 
But, as the planet circles its star,
at a certain point in its orbit
where it's arbitrarily said to have started,
humans bellow and hug their fellows,
as if this carousel hadn't gone around
a few billion times before.

© by Richard Greene.
Used with the author's permission.