Rosh Hashanah Poem

I know Rosh Hashanah is over, but it's still the season...

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to the red and golden skins of apples.
Here’s to wind and other small things that sing.
Here’s to the names of fruits, names that are prayers, names you can hold in your mouth for a long, long time, names that change each morning when the new light pours over them, names that have no endings.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to water.
Here’s to the thousand shades of brown that pass through every ordinary day.
Here’s to dirt.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to yellow squash soup
and sweet onions cooked a long time in a coal-black skillet
and here’s to the years of pride and loneliness in that skillet’s dark, oily bowl,
here’s to the stories written there, the Sunday morning pancakes, the first chard of the season, the blossom of one egg yolk exploding into that expanse of space, meaning sustenance.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to enough for dinner.
Here’s to the bottoms of feet that carry hearts.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to honey that spills over from a glass jar, honey that opens love where it blooms, honey thick and warm and oatmeal-colored, honey that holds together families, honey that sings an answer to darkness with its slow spiral off a wooden spoon.
Here’s to rivers with fish in them that jump, and frogs that lay eggs, and the moment when everything hatches, everything opens, everything finally breaks new and trembling into the world, tumbles into daylight and stays.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to the weight of a ceramic mug between your hands
and here’s to the steam that rises from hot black tea, that weaves itself into the fabric of the kitchen and disappears.
Here’s to what we’ve lost.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to patched jeans and rain boots and wool hats and sweaters.
Here’s to soup in blue enamel pots and familiar faces gathered around tables and nut-brown loaves of round raisin challah.
Here’s to prayers older than bone
and firelight
and songs older than prayer.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to the things that hold us up.
Here’s to the things that let us down.
Here’s to what we can’t let go.
Here’s to what opens us, and what closes us.
Here’s to what we can’t sing.
Here’s to the secret spaces in hearts where words don’t go.
Here’s to what we can touch with the roughened skin of our fingers.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to stinging blue afternoons and mornings cloaked in snow.
Here’s to the days that have blessed us with their patience and their color.
Here’s to the blessings we’ve given each other and the blessings we’ve given the land,
and here’s to the laugher we’ve received and the darkness we’ve accepted,
and here’s to hunger and here’s to fulfillment.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to the breath we’ve breathed.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to the names of our grandmothers and here’s to their prayers, to their sweat, their thick woolen coats, their sadness, their socks.
Here’s to the places we’ll never go with them.
Here’s to what we remember about the lines in their faces and the creases in their laughter.
Here’s to bone.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to bread and honey.
Here’s to blood.

Here’s to a sweet new year.
Here’s to some silence and some noise.
Here’s to some rain and some sweet blue days
and here’s to some bread that doesn’t rise
and some crops that fail
and here’s to a harvest to carry us through the winter
and to an emptiness that will sustain us there.
Here’s to wind that breaks boughs and sings us to sleep
and honors our loneliness.
Here’s to our muscles and our madnesses.
Here’s to some little deaths and some big deaths
and here’s to the moments that change us, and name us, and hold us,
some big ones and some little ones.