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