Spiritual Sunday – High Holy Days
Judaism’s High Holy Days come to an end Tuesday and Wednesday with Yom Kippur, a day of atonement when Jews ask for forgiveness from others and from God. While not necessarily a Yom Kippur poem, Lucille Clifton’s “i am running into a new year” can function as one.
The poems reminds us that there is often one other we must forgive and that is ourselves. I think that some of what Clifton is asking forgiveness for—some of what she said to herself and about herself decades earlier—is not even her fault (for instance, her father abusing her when she was a child). That part of herself is bound up with who she was, and it is this self that she wants to leave behind.
The purpose of the High Holy Days, of entering the Jewish New Year, is to focus on soul—which is to say, on what is most essential. Clifton’s poem works as a prayer that her past forgive her so that she need not obsess about it any longer. That way she can focus on starting anew.
i am running into a new year
by Lucille Cliftoni am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me