by Irene Fowler, Correspondent

To read Irene’s new poem “The Coming New Year” click:

The Coming New Year

by Irene Fowler

2022 – A year marked by trepidation, trials, tribulation or triumph; ticking time will tell

Alas! if we could, but fleetingly glance into the deepest, clearest, mystical, magical well

Or perchance, with desperate abandon, throw countless shiny coins, into Rome’s baroque, Trevi Fountain

Eliciting winged pledges of help, and good fortune, to surmount every advancing mountain

Shakespeare’s ugly, bearded, witchy-hags cackle, into their evil cauldron: ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’

Assuring Macbeth a bloody, kingly throne; every tyrant’s darkest, depraved, self-indulgent dream

Imaginably, humanity will awaken, ere long, and burst out of its somnolent, sinister, hostile bubble

Sinking the authoritarian, piratical armada, sailing on roaring, roiling, anti-democracy, fetid seas

A noxious brotherhood sworn to chaos, iniquity and avarice; their profane refrain: Just-for-us

Is 2022 a year for the flowering and bitter harvest, of the cruel, egoistic, deadly, narcissus?

2022 ! what we have thus far wrought, is hardly, hearty food for cheerful, endearing thought

To be or not to be: The beginning of the scary, dangerous end, or the end of our gloomy, ominous beginning?

Does humanity manage to wing it; or left frazzled, unmoored, undone and – swinging

Economic justice; a sick joke, as the rich get richer, and the poor drown in wretched destitution

Predatory capitalism and oligarchy, a hellish union, and moribund marriage institution

The pale horse of death, surveying the earthly, infernal scene; neighs and brays

COP 26, a brave, yet feeble, ill-fated battle for the planet’s life, soul, and sheer existence

Leaving the world comfortless, and bereft of the hope, inspired, by a painted sky’s golden sunrays

Pandemics, plagues and pestilence; signs of our perilous times, and waning days

Mother Earth, pushing back on man’s nonchalance and doltish arrogance

The guardians of eternity; epitomes of love, equity and justice; fervent to freely gift humanity, their essence, and mother lode

2022 – A new, rare, timely, and precious opportunity, to reset our dishevelled, disrespected, damnable, earthly abode.

©2021 by Irene Fowler