Why the first poem I want to read in 2025 is ‘The Striders’

Because I think, right now, what I need most of all is hope. An unshakeable belief that I — the-thin-stemmed-bubble-eyed-water-bug-I — can also befriend surface tension. Can also walk on water. Can also make the journey. Can also dream of the other side. Can also be.

But there’s more. Ramanujan offers a safe place. Inside his poem, even the skin of water, even a bed of lights, is solid ground. Is possibility. Is time. Is now. Is endlessness.

And how else to enter 2025 than to be armed with everything, anything, that will dispel the darkness. And how else to understand 2025 than to begin with a poem that connects earth and sky. A year in which we might be called upon to conjure happiness, perform miracles, gather kindness, herd the stars, sing away pain, sleep away death, or write new paths through the fog. A year in which we might have to become magic. Become myth. Become us. Become human.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in all this time, it is that no precipice is new. Someone has already been there before. Someone has already conquered it. And very, very likely, someone has already written a poem about it.

I don’t know where Ramanujan stood when he crafted that poem. But for the time it takes to read it, he lets me to stand next to him and hold its delicate wings, its breath mixing inexplicably, with mine.

In any case, this is one way to start this Substack journey: let’s read The Striders together. Let’s find that harmony and stillness of being that allows the wonder of poetry to heal us.

Life. New beginnings. Magic. #Poetry.

(Image: Microsoft AI Designer)