From The Innkeepers

A New Day-January 2022 Blog

As I was readying to prepare some words for this space on our website, Pat alerted me to a new posting on the internet of Amanda Gorman’s poem for the upcoming New Year. In case you don’t recall, she was the Inaugural Poet last year with her groundbreaking poem The Hill We Climb.

As I read her new work to launch the new year, it brought me to tears. I knew that anything else that I could write would be a trivialization of the question and meaning of the events of the year past and what to do with the time that lies before us in the coming year. So rather than carry on, I will share with you her words in the hopes that they will find a place in your hearts in the coming months.

New Day Lyric by Amanda Gorman

We come together
Mourning, we come to mend
Withered, we come to weather,
Torn, we come to tend,
Battered we come to better.
We have been readied by it.
We steadily vow that no matter
How we are weighed down,
We must always pave a way forward.
This hope is our door, our portal,
Even if we never get back to normal,
Someday we can venture beyond it,
To leave the known and take the first steps,
So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next,
What was cursed we will cure.
What was plagued, we prove pure.
Where we tend to argue, we will agree,
Those fortunes we foreswore, now the future we foresee,
Where we weren’t aware, we’re now awake:
Those moments we missed
Are now these moments we make.
The moments we meet,
And our hearts all together beaten,
Now all together beat
Come, look up with kindness yet,
For even solace can be sourced from sorrow,
We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,
But to take on tomorrow.

We heed this old spirit,
In a new day’s lyric
In our hearts, we hear it:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld land syne.
Be bold sang Time this year.
Be bold, sang Time,
For when you honor yesterday,
Tomorrow ye will find.
Know what we’ve fought
Need not be forgotten nor for none.
It defines us, binds us as one,
Come over this day just begun,
For whenever we come together
We will forever overcome.

We wish you many blessings as you pursue your own paths of boldness in the coming year.
For all of us we wish not for a return to normal, but the first steps of paving the way forward, ushering in a new era where we come together in kindness and caring.

May it be so in our time.
Marcia, Pat, and Sharon
Keepers of the Rustic Gate