My favorite New Year's poem. I first read this poem decades ago when I was in elementary school. It was in my brother's high school English text. Even though I couldn't have been in a grade higher than fifth, I read that book from cover to cover and replied to the questions at the end of each work. I did not truly understand this poem, but I knew it was "important" and I liked the sound of it. I understand it now, but I won't bore you by explicating it. However, it says that life is fleeting and the only testimonies are written in stone (the fossil of the fern and the dead in Pompeii). Life is fleeting but people tend to think that there is always "tomorrow."

The New Year means that we are one year closer to death, and the new battles with the old. Nothing has changed even though we listened to a "buried radio" then and communicate on Facebook now. The "buried radio" is silent communication of the stone figures.

And so, we shall all pass . . . Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow, we die.

Year’s End BY RICHARD WILBUR

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.