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FURTHER READING
Poems by Jennifer K. Sweeney
How to Make a Game of Waiting
How to Uproot a Tree
In Flight
Poems About New Year's
In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
A Good Year Down
by Jeni Olin
A New Law
by Greg Delanty
A Song for New Year's Eve
by William Cullen Bryant
At the Entering of the New Year
by Thomas Hardy
Heavy Snowfall in A Year Gone Past
by Laura Jensen
In Tenebris
by Ford Madox Ford
Letter to GC
by Dana Levin
Meditations on the Fall and Winter Holidays
by Charles Reznikoff
New Year's Morning
by Helen Hunt Jackson
New years' morning
by Carl Adamshick
Te Deum
by Charles Reznikoff
The Call of the Open
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy
The Garden Year
by Sara Coleridge
The New Year
by Emma Lazarus
The Old Year
by John Clare
The Passing of the Year
by Robert W. Service
The Year
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Year's Awakening
by Thomas Hardy
Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746
by William Collins
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Fragments for the End of the Year

 
by Jennifer K. Sweeney

On average, odd years have been the best for me.

I’m at a point where everyone I meet looks like a version
of someone I already know.

Without fail, fall makes me nostalgic for things I’ve never experienced.

The sky is molting. I don’t know
if this is global warming or if the atmosphere is reconfiguring
itself to accommodate all the new bright suffering.

I am struck by an overwhelming need to go to Iceland.

Despite all awful variables, we are still full of ideas
as possible as unsexed fruit.

I was terribly sorry to be the one to explain to the first graders
the connection between the sunset and pollution.

On Venus you and I are not even a year old.

Then there were two skies.
The one we fly through and the one
we bury ourselves in.

I appreciate my wide beveled spatula which fulfills
the moment I realized I would grow up and own such things.

I am glad I do not yet want sexy bathroom accessories.
Such things.

In the story we were together every time.

On his wedding day, the stone in his chest
not fully melted but enough.

Sometimes I feel like there are birds flying out of me.






Copyright © 2009 by Jennifer K. Sweeney. Reprinted from How to Live on Bread and Music, with the permission of Perugia Press, www.perugiapress.com, Florence, Massachusetts.
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