New Year's Day 2018 Poem by Daniel Brick

I missed the moment TIME
turned on itself and faced
a new year. A single spin
in the quantum realm and it is
January the First, with a double-
faced god, looking ahead and
behind, acknowledging both past
and future, perhaps balancing
the two to make TIME one reality.
And then there is that heightened
flash in which the present asserts
itself as the very moment of beginning.
I failed on that last night of the old year
to balance being awake and being asleep:
the midnight moment found me napping,
for just the crucial half-hour before
the twelve chimes announced 2018.
My chosen music, Beethoven's Rasoumovsky
Quartet No.2, in which the strings evoke
the calm constellations arching over us,
played itself into silence. I can take
no credit for this year's turning: I was
just an unconscious man, not even playing
the role of witness, offering neither help
nor hindrance to an event so much larger
than my existence as a denizen of surfaces.
And TIME in its mighty solitude unfolds our lives
toward whatever welcoming eternity awaits us.