A Poem for New Year
Between the glass of window and door,
the wee hours dissolve; a flickering
of lights paints and repaints the same
room until the knocking of the wind
gives way to a creeping shadow of light
and, upstairs, the emptying of bladders.
I knew then there is no future;
only a present of endless possibilities.
Two boys, scuffling over a stick,
red-faced and full of it, look up
and, with a kind of smiling, stilted
embarrassment, find themselves men.
No more the vicissitude of crazy golf!
We walk to the edge where the breakers
spill, where the salted, rotting innards
of a building, once grand, disgorge,
where red-eyed drunks, young couples
with prams and nowhere to go
sit, watch and wait for the tide to go out.
In a room full of possibilities,
no more the empty resolution of the door.
Tom Chivers 