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74 Meditation on the Old Year Infinite bride of witness sung to sleep by the whisper of heat rising from metal, the woodstove’s mammoth sigh. It was a war-torn year. We ate, all of us, from the plates of sadness, whether we knew it or not. Now slumped before the fire, our collective memory, pale and fine, shrugs off its care. Like a child with a poignant thumb, it comforts itself, wrapping hope like a blanket against the bitter dark. See, another sheaf of months, more grids to fill in with care, numbers adding up to a slippery lesson. Imagine our earth closing up over blood, growing grass on graves unmourned. Let us for one night be new again, have before us the white bird whole. ...

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