New Year’s Eve

Janus guards each slow retreat as eager-
ly as he surveys the waking year; re-
prise in every exodus. Consider
Lot’s bewildered wife;     what relic did she

see burning in the halted hearth, debris
that swiveled her backward, away from birth?

Perhaps it was the passage she feared. Dearth
of remembrance so deep, it seemed a fierce
madness to enter. As for us?    The earth
     has ways—stay or leave—to salt us to tears.

Sofia M. Starnes, Virginia Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, is the author of six poetry collections, including The Consequence of Moonlight. Some of her more recent poems can be found in Image, First Things, the Bellevue Literary Review, and Christianity and Literature. Sofia is currently working on a collection of dizains, a recasting of this fifteenth-to-sixteenth-century poetic form. She lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, with her husband, Bill.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”