Old year, you were all right, if a bit strange,
like a homely doll that comforts us
while lying in bed trying not to hear
our parents arguing. You were the cat
snarled with burdock and stick-thin who shows up
at our door, who, brushed and fed, loses some
of the fear in his eyes. And you were
the new song that sounds odd but which we begin
to love after we’ve heard it a few times.

Beyond all this, you were a piece of life
integral to the unfolding story
whose ending, we hope, is a beginning.
And so, hiking on in the mist, we throw
you back a kiss for your insistence
on happiness in unlikely circumstances,
and pick up our pace a little remembering
how safe we came to feel within ourselves,
putting our trust in you day after day.

Thomas R. Smith spent his first 18 years on the Chippewa River in Cornell. He now lives near the Kinnickinnic River in River Falls where he writes and teaches online for the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His most recent books are Medicine Year (poetry) and Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival(essays). He posts poems and blogs at thomasrsmithpoet.com.