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20/20 Vision
You’re lurking in the shadows with a wink.
I see your flute of crystal, hear you pop
Your cork as spirits soar and keen arms link
To strains of Auld Lang Syne as clock hands stop.
In moonlight, while lips melt in midnight’s kiss,
You sashay in as glasses ring and rise
With toasts to bright tomorrows—future bliss
In highs and sighs as rockets burst in skies.
I watch the selfsame show of yesteryear.
Your dog and pony trot out with aplomb—
Panache before a phony flash of fear
Ignites and then explodes—another bomb!
Twenty Twenty-Two, you’re nothing new—
You can’t mask that you’re Twenty Twenty… too.
.
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Susan Jarvis Bryant is from Kent, England. She is now an American citizen living on the coastal plains of Texas. Susan has poetry published in the UK webzine, Lighten Up On Line, The Daily Mail, and Openings (anthologies of poems by Open University Poets).
Oh-oh, it’s going to get worse before it can get better, won’t it?
I don’t read Hebrew well enough to be able to assess how Jeremiah’s Lamentations compare in quality to your poetry Susan, but as to subject matter…
I hear you.
Happy New Year to you and Mike:)
In spite of my pessimistic poem, I have hope… I am going to bring all that hope to 2022 and start the year with a smile. Between my lines is an extremely well-hidden optimist just waiting to burst forth.
Thank you very much for your appreciation, support, and beautiful music. Happy New Year, Yael, with love from me and Mike!
Champagne clever, Susan! A very witty working in of all the New Year’s party paraphernalia, providing a clearer vision of the future than we usually get this time of year. But who couldn’t see it, having already been warned of how many “cases” are coming, whether or not we have parties? Have a happy New Year’s fest!
“Champagne clever”… I love it! I only wish I could agree with you on the 20/20 vision front… I often ask myself why the skullduggery of 2021 hasn’t brought with it a clearer perspective. Sadly, it hasn’t for many. Let’s hope 2022 will bring with it a guiding light. Thank you for all your wonderful poems and informative comments, Margaret. A very Happy New Year to you! x
Dear Susan,
Knowing how deeply you feel about the miserable mess we are in on all fronts, I must say I admire your determination to have hope for the coming year. I am taking a more historic view; trying to preserve the past as examples for the future. But we are on the same page in our disgust and despair.
Let’s join hands tonight to pray for what we know is right. Your work remains, as always, at its high level. I will remember this year as one in which I discovered the excellence of your prolific output. Please you and Mike (to say nothing of good old King George, Feline to Poets, look forward to a happy and productive New Year, champagne and all; Margaret, you are invited too.
Dear Sally, what a beautiful comment. I like your ‘historic view’ approach. An historic view certainly brings perspective to current day cruelty and chaos. I’d love to join hands tonight to pray for what we know is right and to raise a glass of Champagne with many poets at the SCP who, in their own unique and admirable voices, bring sanity to a mad world. Here’s wishing you a bright and beautiful new year, with love from me, Mike and King George Lionel. x
A poem for every occasion, you can always be relied on for that, and despite the constraints, why are they always such blinking good ones? I hope Yael and you and Margaret are wrong in your unhappy prognostications but I fear that it’s only going to get worse before it gets even worse. Wishing somebody a Happy New Year has long since become just a bit of sarcastic flimflam and rhetoric, and the refreshing realism of your poem is full of the Weltschmerz we’ll all be suffering from in a maximum of twenty-two too many days into the New Year. Susan, wishing you and Mike, without a trace of irony, a very happy new year, all in lower case.
‘Blinking good’ has made my New Year’s Eve – thank you, Peter. I hope I go on to produce a few more blinking good ones in 2022… from a happier perspective. I promise you I haven’t abandoned hope and joy. Hope and joy spur me on each day, especially when I’m in the company of hummingbirds. In fact, I’m so optimistic, I think a dodo may show up in my backyard before spring. Peter, I wish you a superlative new year filled with fine poetry and fun chats on the SCP site with your many fans… me and Mike included.
Susan, Happy New Year to you and Mike. Your poetry is NEVER pessimistic. It is always inspiring and from a numpty in England I thank you both.
Thank you for the offer of posting my humble offering here so here goes…
THE BALLAD OF TOULOUSE LAUTREC
It’s New Years Eve Evening in old Paris town,
The night when Parisians let their hair down.
There’s laughing and dancing and folk getting drunk,
And all of the ladies are looking like punks.
It just needs an artist to capture the scene,
But Toulouse Lautrec is nowhere to be seen.
There’s lots of debauchery down by the Seine,
Where couples are at it, again and again.
With long-legged females, their busts hanging out,
And randy old blokes who all year go without.
A talented painter would have lots of fun,
But Toulouse Lautrec, where the hell has he gone?
The pimps and the hookers are having a ball,
In the seedy back-alleys behind the Pigalle.
As bright-painted ladies with sailor boys flirt,
While doing the can-can and lifting their skirts.
But where is the man who can capture all this?
He’s over in England and out on the piss.
Happy New Year to all on SCP.
Jeff, Mike and I love this and we’re glad it’s receiving a wider audience. Here’s wishing you a bright and beautiful, music and poetry-filled 2022. Your music and poems are an absolute joy… and an antidote to the melancholic moments this mad world brings. Thank you!!
These days, everyone is needy. And it’s fortunate that your good wit and humor are in abundant supply. In your darkest hour you shed more light than 100,000 Roman candles.
C.B., your comment is lovely. Thank you for your guidance, inspiration, and encouragement. I wish you all the best in life, new year or not. May that 10 year old Glenmorangie hit the spot!
Susan, I love that you are always able to tell it like it is, entertain at the same time, and still provide a much needed dose of hope.
I wish you and Mike all the best for the year ahead, no matter what it brings.
David, I appreciate your words and would like to thank you for your support and inspiration throughout the year. It’s comments like yours that bring my future poems about. With much gratitude, I wish you the same. Let’s hope we have a magnificent year ahead “no matter what it brings”. We at the SCP are made of stern stuff and I’m sure our words will make a difference to the poetry scene as well as the political one.
Susan, thank you for the splendid little sonnet. Your mastery of prosody as always shines through. But what I particularly love about this poem is the ominous, almost-hidden noir tone that lurks behind the usual new year’s eve trappings — your lurking shadows looming over the champagne all presided over by a stopped clock that Edgar Allen Poe would be proud of. You personify Annum 2022 to great effect — a femme fatale? a con-artist in a tuxedo? — and your accusations against it are well-supported by your trademark sardonic wit.
You had a choice to make about referring back to 2020 versus 2021. 2021’s year of lies might have better served the concept — I think the covidian family resemblance is closer — but 2020 had its own share of lies and — more importantly — allowed you to have some fun playing with the 20-20 vision metaphor. A very reasonable artistic decision on your part.
All in all a very fine — if slightly disturbing/decidedly unPollyanna-ish — way to ring out the old and ring in the… old. Love it! Happy new year to you and Mike!
Brian, your comments always make me smile. I am thrilled at your mention of Poe… and all that lurking… you have a knack of spotting the beast between the lines… that sly soupçon of the sinister I was going for. I hope 2022 isn’t a fusion of the femme fatale with the con-artist in a tuxedo. I have a suspicion it might be… but, where would my poetry be without a smidgeon of skullduggery? As for the 2020 versus 2021… I went down the wordplay route… I simply couldn’t help myself. Brian, thank you very much. Here’s wishing you a year of fine poetry and peace… although, lack of the latter… oops, I’ll stop before I bring on another year of disaster! Happy new year!