After Camille T. Dungy

Is this the year for understanding?
The smell of catastrophe, in all dimensions, descends like age.
It is a year for danger with its chemical reek and possible claws.
Tension, this year brings pressure that turns raw stone to crystals.

This is the year things keep coming back, words that will not save us,
and regrets that are or aren’t worth having but there they stand,
making thin sounds in the wind, semaphores corroded by truth.

This year the body’s greed will be tested,
It will go beyond everything you have done, all that has been done to you.
We are inundated with palliatives, sops, to soothe our blistered egos.
There are no angels but the angels of suffering, alchemy and rust.

This is the year for sharp-edged honesty, the pointed truth,
with all the frankness of a bone saw.