New Year’s Hope

Poems about small hopes, from Kathleen Hellen, Becky Sakellariou, Paula Sergi, and Martin Steyer.

TRANSCRIPT

It’s 2026! One of our hopes for the new year is that it won’t take us too long to remember to write 2026 rather than 2025 on our checks and letters and the various forms we have to fill out. But we often start the new year with other hopes, as well. When you’re younger, you tend to have higher, more concrete hopes—a new job, a new president, world peace, that sort of thing. As we get older, our hopes for the future are often smaller, maybe more within our control. That’s what this episode of Burning Bright is about.

We’ll start with Kathleen Hellen’s poem “Anthem at Graduation.” She dedicated it to James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) and Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970).

We sing the Book of Numbers
Mums, gladiolas swelling in their ribboned dress

Vaudeville of rejoicing, each a Lazarus
A choir of black faces, staged

Not run away but faith rehearsed
In normal schools for coloreds
In run-down auditoriums

There is a prayer after despair
Be not afraid

Kathleen Hellen’s “Anthem at Graduation” from Passager’s Martin Luther King commemorative issue.

Becky Sakellariou said, “I love little odd, random pieces of information, especially scientific facts. Sometimes these bits suddenly fit into a new order, and a poem comes.” Here’s Becky’s poem from Passager’s 2011 Poetry Contest issue “White Matter.”

Her collarbone filled with light when he told her
about the old New York City subway cars hurled into the Atlantic
off the Maryland coast to create an artificial reef for marine life.

Later she saw fields of thistles, wild vines, mustard blossoms.
It rained mint, and she learned that the volume of white matter
in her brain would expand as soon as she learned to juggle.

She heard his skin pulsing with gratitude, noticed the sky
around his head vibrating in a frequency like stained glass.
His voice became a line of perfect crystals without a single blemish.

At dawn, the sea gull and the crow carried her to the land
between the sun and the moon where she watched the sun
drop color over oranges, blackberries, water.

She was all white, an elegy to unyielding space, dead men and wolves.
The sea turtles swam into the sound of years, imprinted with their return.
There was no end to what she saw and heard.

“White Matter,” Becky Sakellariou.

Paula Sergi said, “Challenging times in the family and a long Wisconsin winter had me isolating myself and questioning my resilience. The promise of an eventual Spring and a meditation practice led me to write the opening lines of this poem as a declaration of renewal. From there the poem wrote itself and this process of discovery brought me to a sort of spiritual transcendence.” She said, ‘The poem recalls a quote from Joseph Campbell: “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”’ Here’s Paula Sergi’s poem “Registration.”

Sign me up to walk with the living.
My password has always been Heathen
with an exclamation point

but now I’m not so sure.
I’m registering today after
months of being dormant.

The only committees I’ll be on
will have to deal with others,
not the ones you’d expect

to be in this group, not only
those who look or think like me
but the fragile, more fragile

than me even, the thin, bedraggled,
the misfits and malcontents
the undernourished and unprotected,

the ones who question endlessly,
annoyingly, and frustrate me when
I’m so sure I’m doing well,

I’m on the right path. Bill me later
in case I change my mind. Send me
notice on my happy days of sunshine,

that someone else, right now
suffers. Give me their address.
Strengthen my signal.

From Passager’s 2023 Poetry Contest issue, “Registration” by Paula Sergi.

Martin Steyer was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease over 20 years ago. He said, “I’m well acquainted with the daily effort needed just to show up. It can sometimes feel like all of nature is conspiring against you.” He said, “But as Friedrich Nietzche wrote in 1888, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” We’ll end this episode about both hope and controlling our destinies with Martin Steyer’s poem “Manifesto.”

Each day I manage to show up,
the landscape is amazed that I have not perished.
I thought he was gone, murmurs the brook
before tumbling down a ravine.
Today is the day, affirms the mountain
as it sinks into shadow.
Good riddance! echoes the valley. Good riddance!

But that day never seems to arrive,
and I grow brazen and bold.
In plain view, I sit on a park bench,
eating lunch with the smallest of sparrows.
I waltz past headstones, whistling tunes.
I fling the salty sweat from my head
straight into the glaring eye of the midday sun.

This poem, too, was from Passager’s 2023 Poetry Contest issue: “Manifesto,” Martin Steyer.

18th and 19th Century poet William Blake said, “He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.”

To subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.

Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.

For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.

Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.