New year’s wishes

That everyone could see
 we are all ants scurrying
 round the palm of a sometime 
 benevolent mountainside. 

 To everyone, the riches
 of standing on the edge
 of a loch’s dropping off point,
 a thousand feet deep and falling. 

 Be the perfect ‘o’
 of a child’s wowing mouth
 beneath the soar
 of a golden eagle. 

 Feel the scour of the wind
 as it strips trees naked,
 howling all around:
 “You are alive!” 

 I wish you hills to climb,
 a housefree horizon,
 sunshine that hazes
 and stretches its arms. 

 Have the gift of silence,
 the roar of the world
 and a sense of wonder
 at the push and the pull, 

 the weft and the warp
 of a planet that holds us
 in a fold of its skin
 for all of the blink of an eye. 

 Harry Gallagher

First published in North East Bylines 31 December 2020