“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first Poetry Friday of 2026! (Find out more about Poetry Friday here.) I’m happy to be hosting everyone today and am looking forward to reading your poems. As it is also the first Friday of the month, it’s time for another Inklings challenge. This month, I proposed that we write poems after Mary Lee’s “December” poem. Here is my offering:

January

dawns like
a new skein of yarn:
a colorful coil
of possibilities.
Row after row,
the yarn unfurls
and kaleidoscopic
patterns emerge.

Maybe not what you expected.
Maybe you don’t even like it.

But then you step back, 
look from a different angle,
and behold the surprising beauty
unfolding before your eyes.

Draft, © Catherine Flynn, 2026

Please leave your link below, then be sure to visit my fellow Inklings to find out how they’re welcoming the New Year.

Heidi Mordhorst @ My Juicy Little Universe
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche
Mary Lee Hahn @ Another Year of Reading
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone