By Carrie Williams Clifford The New Year comes—fling wide, fling wide the door Of Opportunity! the spirit free To scale the utmost heights of hopes to be, To rest on peaks ne’er reached by man before! The boundless infinite let us explore, To search out undiscovered mystery, Undreamed of in our poor philosophy! The bounty of the gods upon us pour! Nay, in the New Year we shall be as gods: No longer apish puppets or dull clods Of clay; but poised, empowered to command, Upon the Etna of New Worlds we’ll stand— This scant earth-raiment to the winds will cast— Full richly robed as supermen at last! This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 1, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets. About the poet: Carrie Williams Clifford was born in September, 1862, in Chillicothe, Ohio. A poet and activist, she is the author of “Race Rhymes” (1911) “The Widening Light” (1922). She was a co-founder and first president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women. She hired Black women for the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the NAACP. Clifford taught in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and worked as an editor for the “Cleveland Journal”. She died in 1934.The New Year
