New Year's Eve 2019

This was a poetic experiment I made a few years ago. I was trying to write directly from my own experience, without using fictional characters or scenarios, and I was trying to write about very specific themes.

This poem is about a New Year's Eve party I attended in Ballymun, the working class housing estate in Dublin where I lived most of my life, on the last day of 2019. Everything mentioned in it is true.

My father had died that May. Every New Year's Eve, he would attend a party held in his best friend's house, where the crowd was very Irish republican and there was much singing of ballads and other songs. This would be the first such party without him.

I did indeed spend about a half an hour that evening trying to find some documentary or TV show looking back on the decade ending that night, and I was indeed unsuccessful. And I did find myself wondering if decades, as we had come to understand them, had simply stopped happening.

The housing estate where the party was held, Sillogue Gardens, was a particular area in Ballymun that I associated with the youth culture of the 1980s. When I was a kid, it always seemed full of teenagers. Even when I lived there myself, later on, it didn't lose this atmosphere.

My father used to say "Next year in Jerusalem" every New Year's Eve. I'm not sure exactly what he meant. Presumably it was a vague wish for a better year. 

I describe my father as a "myth-maker" as he had a rare gift for lending significance to his own experiences, through the stories he told of them. I've only met about three people who had this talent, if that's the right word, to the same degree.

I describe history as an "uncertain sure thing" because it's definitely going to happen (barring the destruction of the whole human race), but it's impossible to anticipate.

The people at the party did go from singing Irish rebel songs to singing rock and pop songs, which I found depressing.

What I don't mention in the poem is that I recited "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe. It didn't go down well. I could tell everybody was bored and listening politely.

Is it possible for a poem with such personal themes and subject matter to speak to a general reader? Well, you decide.

New Year's Eve 2019 

In the last hours of a decade with no name
I flicked through channels, looking for some show
Where guests would put the decade in a frame
And hang it. Surely there’d be one…but no.

The fifties, sixties, seventies…had they
Expired like this, uncommented upon?
I didn't think so, even though they say
You never see the Zeitgeist till it's gone.

My father hated end-of-year reviews
Nostalgist though he was, the same as me.
A dinosaur addicted to the news.
This was the first New Year he wouldn't see.

Tonight, bizarrely, he’d be missing from
The New Year's hooly that his best friend threw
Year after year. So I’d agreed to come
Although I felt uneasy in that crew.

They sang all night and drank to beat the band
And I'd heard decades of familiar tales
About them (sometimes more than I could stand,
Weary of tracing their well-trodden trails).

All socialists, republicans, and such,
Children of Pearse and Connolly and Sands.
Their slogans (though not mine) were double Dutch
To this new Ireland of Big Tech and brands.

We’d moved to Sillogue Gardens just a bit
After my mother’s death, when the Twin Towers
Were newly fallen. Though we’d lived in it
For eighteen years, it never quite seemed ours.

Our New Year hosts had lived there all the time
I’d been alive. It was their realm. And yet
Its atmosphere was not the sad sublime
Of rebel ballads, rosy with regret.

To me, at least, the Gardens still preserved
Their nineteen-eighties vibe, all teenage pop
And roller-skates and bubble-gum. It’s where
I’d seen most of that kid’s stuff, growing up.

Who would recall the twenty-teens like that?
And what about the noughties? Just a name.
The view down twenty years was almost flat.
I strained for images and nothing came.

Well, New Year’s Eve. I took my corner spot.
The early-party awkwardness went by.
(They spoke more Irish than I thought, this lot.)
I listened to a story from some guy.

The night advanced. The rebel songs began.
The grievances of decades filled the air.
Songs lend us life beyond man’s natural span.
My father sang these songs. He wasn't there.

And as the night wore on, the party seemed
Almost a wake…the old spoke of the dead.
So few this year, where once this house had teemed
Each New Year's Eve. That's what my father said.

The rebel ballads ended, and they sung
“The Boxer” and “the day the music died”.
The decade's final hour was almost done.
We went to see the fireworks start outside.

Kisses and hugs and phone calls and bad jokes.
“Next Year in Jerusalem” my father said
Each New Year's Eve. We stood and tried to coax
Some sense of wonder. Someone went to bed.

My father, myth-maker, was now a part
Of that uncertain sure thing, history.
Covid was next. Oh, hapless human heart,
What hopes and fears you fix on memory!