Sonnet Sunday 80: The Year

It took me longer than you’d think to realize exactly how bad things are, but 2018 has been a year of slow-simmering stress, and it’s been bubbling over a LOT recently. The bad news is, due to important but difficult work changes, things won’t get much easier for the next few months. The good news is, once I started to realize how bad things had really become, I started taking steps to do something about it. I wrote today’s sonnet as part of the Poem a Day challenge, a month before I hit the boiling point, but it works as a summary of 2018, as well as my hopeful expectation for the future, even if it takes longer than I’d like to get here.

The Year

Originally written November 6, 2018

It’s been a year of loss. My paid-off car,
My debt freedom, my quiet, my spare room—
My sunny skies are clouded with a gloom—
I feel like I have traveled very far
Over the last twelve months. Now chaos reigns.
My life’s a wobbling raft within a storm:
This instability is my new norm.
I start to wonder: Is life really pain?
No: It’s a season. Every autumn, leaves
Fall to the ground. The trees look bare and dead,
Left naked when cruel winter rears its head,
Yet ever year I see them, and believe
That one day, trudging through the snow and mud,
I’ll look up at a branch and see the buds.

Photo by Nick Nice on Unsplash