Chinese New Year Poem

Happy Chinese New Year

you make a mistake, erase it from the board.

you tire of dabbing the bottom of the paint cup.

you want a fresh start,

to break free from the same-old,

be brand new, but still be you.

China? They know how to work with

the same old thing,

have been at it

for five thousand years.

so every Chinese New Year’s,

there are reasons we clean our houses

from top to bottom, sweep away

last year’s bad luck with a broom.

what better time to wear new clothes,

make up with friends you’ve had fights with,

paint the front door with a fresh coat of red,

spread out bright flowers and bowls of glowing fruit.

most of all, spill by the hundreds to line streets for

parades of dragon puppets 50-people long,

looping and curving into a long-life ahead,

to see lions dance with roosters dance with monkeys,

and watch clowns mime, somersault, walk on stilts.

gongs and cymbals ring through icy air

warming the winter February here in Chinatown

into a new spring we can’t yet see, but can imagine.

even our ancestors celebrate,

and clap their hands from a faraway place.

there are reasons this happens over and over,

because no matter how old our culture grows,

each year is new to its people,

we are all young ones in this ancient world,

with hopes, ideas, heartbeats

that spark and pop

like a huge braid of firecrackers,

there are countless reasons to believe

that everything we are

will fill up the next year

to the brim.

~ Cynthia Gallaher ◦

Chinese New Year Poem

Punxsutawney Phil Groundhog Day Poem

Punxsutawney Phil
Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Weather Reporter Extraordinaire

Halfway between the dawn and sunset of winter,
it’s the high noon of the season.
Will old sol wear sunglasses today
and keep his rays of warmth and wisdom to himself,
or take Punxsy Phil by surprise?

Phil ascends with bleary eyes
from watching “Groundhog Day” over or over
again last night in his public library lair,
and looks as puzzled and ruffled haired as Bill Murray
as he pokes his head out of the tree stump, wondering,
“What did I get myself in the middle of?”

He stands on hind legs and raises his paws
you’d think he were Santa Claus the way the cameras flash,
causing artificial shadows of himself
to loom in every direction,
like a dozen enormous cut-outs of T-rex, vexed.

Halfway between Christmas and Easter,
between the solstice and equinox,
between a native ritual and a European tradition,
between a squirrel and a woodchuck,
Phil’s stuck,
here, with all these people.
He keeps looking over the crowd
for Andie MacDowell, but only faces strangers.

Then Phil sees the sun peeking out from behind
a billowy cumulus cloud,
and hears the sudden roar of the crowd,
because everyone finally notices his real shadow
is what’s on the ground,
and think he’s afraid when he looks where they’re looking,
then exits the other way back down the tree stump hole.

But he’s not scared at all,
just plain tired of all the fuss
and from staying up so groundhog, doggone late,
when any other rodent worth his fur
would know to hibernate.
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~ Cynthia Gallaher ◦

Punxsutawney Phil Groundhog Day Poem