new starts | Sally Wiener Grotta

On December 31, 2022, I imagined myself teetering on the second hand of the clock, counting down to the next installment in our lives. In that last second, between years, what do we see or know of the past or the future? That was the seed of my new year’s poem for 2023.

I stand at the cusp of midnight.
To my left, yesterday, and all that’s gone.
To my right, tomorrow, the quantum future.
I stand in an empty space.
No now or here or where.

In this vacant moment, in this cusp,
Between what was and what could be,
I am an amalgam of everyone I’ve loved.
Filled to the brim with lives
Fully lived, fully lost.

I yearn toward the memories.
Smiles and walks and the weaving of tales.
A new us with every adventure, and arguments, too.
Yet always returning to our true north,
To our home, to us.

Midnight will come and disappear
When I must be more than a mirror of memories.
Here, in this moment of potentials,
Before the seconds break this silence,
I am a tabula rasa, a tale untold.

The seconds spill from this place.
Midnight turns, a year unfurls to my right.
I can’t know what it will bring, only what is gone.
In my core, a molten, enduring amalgam,
As I prepare to embrace what might be.

~Sally Wiener Grotta, December 31, 2022