A NEW YEAR
Who is approaching?
Oh, arctic February
wading through snowdrifts.
I have heard birds sing,
but I fear their bills will be
frozen closed before
their songs are finished.
Not yet has old King Frost had
the cold pleasure of
snatching them in his
frigid embrace. Would that we
might spend this year, now
fleeting swiftly by,
better than the one that we
cannot now recall.
"A New Year" is from Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson's Letters Together with Essays on the Subject by Various Hands, edited with an introduction by Lewis Turco, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (www.SUNYPress.edu), 1993. ISBN 0-791414-17-5, cloth; ISBN 0-791414-18-3, paper. All poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007.
