ANOTHER NEW YEAR'S EVE

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

A flock of migrating Canada geese take flight from Colorado in 2014. Credit: Amanda Sutherland, Reporter-Herald.

On a chilly December afternoon
A paper-white gibbous moon
Hauls itself over the eastern hills
Up through the seasonal haze
Into a sky crowded with pale, nondescript clouds
Shuffling between horizons.
A single winter sparrow pecks for seeds
On the ground beneath the grape arbor.
We open the doors and windows
To the cold air
And not without trepidation
Face those far hills
Where the new year will first reveal itself.
The future has twisted out of our grasp
And belongs now
To our children and grandchildren
To whom we must apologize
For leaving them to struggle
Against the tempests we might have prevented
But did not.
We cannot know if they will succeed or fail,
Cannot know if migrating geese and cranes and swans
Will someday not return
To the ponds and marshes
Where they have wintered for ten thousand thousand years,
Cannot know if the Great Mother
Will finally disown, disinherit and evict all her offspring,
The righteous and the not,
While this infinitesimal blue bubble once called Home
Goes on wobbling and spinning
Through the oceanic darkness
Of the undivided now.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California.

PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE

by Thomas R. Smith

Late afternoon sun on snow. Intense
flare concentrated in the west, skimming
cold shadows pooling below the dam.
On the path I stop a moment to commiserate
with a friend, both of us scalded by
the daily piss shower out of the White House.
Still January and the open river
hosts hundreds of ducks, geese, and swans. The new
EPA head listens to oil and coal
companies but not the community
of beings. I see my neighbors the water-
birds almost every day. I must owe them
something. Does money and power have
the right to disregard their fate? Ryan
and Pence stand smirking behind T***p while
the lit fuse sparks past their ankles.
Do they really believe that only
the President will be burned? Things can
get corrupted so inconspicuously—
a file, water, air, democracy—that we often
notice only when the screen’s gone blank.
The body politic knows it’s infected,
will the immune system mobilize?
The purveyors of “alternate facts” tried to
smear Rachel Carson too.  Heroically
she saved us from ourselves. Do we have it
in us to save us from ourselves this time?
I look out past the fliers and swimmers
at home on the river, toward the sun’s
setting splendor.  Our twilight will be
uglier, like the men at the top. To them
say, Earth first! You can’t be my government
if you won’t be the government of the geese.


Thomas R. Smith has had hundreds of poems published on three continents.  In the United States, his poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.  His poems were included in Editor's Choice II (The Spirit That Moves Us Press), a selection of the best of the American small press, and in The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner).  His work has reached wide national audiences on Garrison Keillor's public radio show Writer's Almanac and former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. His most recent book of poems is The Glory from Red Dragonfly Press.