Morning Open Thread: The Mirror of Our Time Broke – Poems for 2020’s End

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So grab your cuppa, and join in!

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I am looking forward to 2021 with hope and anxiety. These past years have been too full of wickedness, hatred, and greed. There is so much that needs repairing and restarting. The interconnectedness of humankind – that belief that we are all in this together – is top of my list. What’s on your list of hopes for 2021?

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This first poem comes from one of the leading poets of the Kurdish people, and reflects what I hope we will be leaving behind.

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Mirror

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by Kajal Ahmad

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The vague mirror of my time
broke because
it made what was small big
and what was big small.
Dictators and monsters filled its face.
Even now as I breathe
its shards pierce the walls of my heart
and instead of sweat
I leak glass.

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“Mirror” from Handful of Salt,© 2016 by Kajal Ahmad, translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse – The Word Works

Kajal Ahmad (1967 - ) born in Kirkuk, a disputed city in Iraq with a strong Kurdish population. A poet, journalist, feminist, and social critic, she has published four books: Benderî Bermoda (Thanks to Bermuda), Wutekanî Wutin (title untranslated),  Qaweyek le gel ev da (This is What the People Said), and Awênem şikand (Awesome Broke). Ahmad worked for over a decade as the Editor-in-Chief of Kurdistani Nwe and at times has worked as a TV host for KurdSat. She has also worked as a front-line journalist, embedding as a member of the peshmerga (“those who face death”– the military forces of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq). In the mountains, alongside the fighters, she began to write poetry.

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In Scotland, New Year’s is called Hogmanay, and it is a major holiday there, with many traditions stretching back for generations.

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View of Scotland/Love Poem

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by Liz Lochhead

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Down on her hands and knees
at ten at night on Hogmanay,
my mother still giving it elbowgrease
jiffywaxing the vinolay. (This is too
ordinary to be nostalgia.) On the kitchen table
a newly opened tin of sockeye salmon.
Though we do not expect anyone,
the slab of black bun,
petticoat-tails fanned out
on bone china.
‘Last year it was very quiet…’

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Mum’s got her rollers in with waveset
and her well-pressed good dress
slack across the candlewick upstairs.
Nearly half-ten already and her not shifted!
If we’re to even hope to prosper
this midnight must find us
how we would like to be.
A new view of Scotland
with a dangling calendar
is propped under last year’s,
ready to take its place.

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Darling, it’s thirty years since
anybody was able to trick me,
December thirty-first, into
‘looking into a mirror to see a lassie
wi as minny heids as days in the year’–
and two already since,
familiar strangers at a party,
we did not know that we were
the happiness we wished each other
when the Bells went, did we?

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All over the city
off-licenses pull down their shutters,
people make for where they want to be
to bring the new year in.
In highrises and tenements
sunburst clocks tick
on dusted mantelshelves.
Everyone puts on their best spread of plenty
(for to even hope to prosper
this midnight must find us
how we would like to be).
So there’s a bottle of sickly liqueur
among the booze in the alcove,
golden crusts on steak pies
like quilts on a double bed.
And this is where we live.
There is no time like the
present for a kiss.

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“View of Scotland/Love Poem”from A Choosing: Selected Poems by Liz Lochhead (Polygon 2011)

Liz Lochhead (1947 - ) Scottish poet, playwright, translator, and broadcaster. She  won the 1971 BBC Scotland Poetry Competition. Her first book of poetry, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972. Lochhead served as Poet Laureate of Glasgow (2005-2011), and was Scotland’s Poet Laureate (Makar) from 2011 to 2016. Her poetry collections include Islands, The Grimm Sisters, and Dreaming Frankenstein. Her plays include Blood and Ice,Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, and The Perfect Days. She is a feminist, and a supporter of Scottish independence.

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And finally, a poem from America, by a mother who has hopes for the new year, in spite of her fears and common sense.

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Rain, New Year's Eve

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by Maggie Smith

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The rain is a broken piano,
playing the same note over and over.

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My five-year-old said that.
Already she knows loving the world

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means loving the wobbles
you can't shim, the creaks you can't

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oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,
MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.

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Let me love the cold rain's plinking.
Let me love the world the way I love

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my young son, not only when
he cups my face in his sticky hands,

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but when, roughhousing,
he accidentally splits my lip.

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Let me love the world like a mother.
Let me be tender when it lets me down.

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Let me listen to the rain's one note
and hear a beginner's song.

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“Rain, New Year's Eve” from Good Bones,© 2017 by Maggie Smith – Tupelo Press

Maggie Smith (1977 – ), the one who is not a famous British actress, is an American poet, freelance writer, and editor, who lives with her husband and two children in Bexley, Ohio. Her poetry collections include Lamp of the Body;Good Bones;The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, which won the 2012 Dorset Prize; and Disasterology.

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

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