Most New Year poems reach for grand gestures: fresh starts, resolutions, the turning of a page. Dave Bonta's "Firsts" does something smaller and odder. At 8:30 on a January morning, with the day barely begun, the speaker decides to take attendance. The poem is only ten lines, yet it makes a surprisingly full argument about what it means to start a year: you begin by noticing who and what is present, yourself included.
The opening simile does the most unexpected work. The speaker acts "like a bear making claw marks / on a telephone pole." A bear scratching a pole is an old, instinctive way of saying *I was here*, and the comparison gives the speaker's decision a rough animal urgency. But the next line pulls in the other direction, toward the schoolroom and the clipboard: "I decide to take roll." The wild gesture and the bureaucratic one sit side by side, and the clash is funny. It also shows that taking roll is a kind of marking, a way of claiming a patch of the world by naming what lives in it. The telephone pole matters too. It is a tree turned into infrastructure, so even the bear's wildness is scratching at something half-human.
The second stanza is the roll itself, and its construction is the poem's quiet cleverness. There are no verbs here, only a list of noun phrases: "Low-flying geese, / solitary crow, / squirrel on the head of a concrete dog, / the fog." The lines start short and compact, then the third stretches out to ten syllables, the longest in the poem. That is where the comedy sits. A living squirrel perched on a lifeless statue is the sort of detail that only turns up when someone is really looking, and it makes the "roll" feel observed rather than invented. Then the list collapses again to "the fog," two syllables. Fog and "dog" also give the poem its one clear rhyme, a small click of sound that closes the list. The first stanza has a softer echo in "pole" and "roll," near-rhymes that link the bear's gesture to the speaker's decision.
The order of the list is worth noticing. It moves from the plural, "geese," to the "solitary" crow, to a single squirrel, and ends on something that cannot be counted at all. Taking roll usually assumes distinct individuals who can each say "present." Fog dissolves such edges, so including it is gently absurd, and also generous. The speaker's attendance sheet has no category for what does not count, and the fog gets a line to itself anyway, with the definite article "the" treating it as just as much a regular as the crow. Everything that happens to be there qualifies.
Then the last stanza turns the poem on its head: "Here, I answer. / Here." The speaker has been the one calling names, and now becomes one of the names. The comma and the line break after "answer" create a small pause, as if the speaker has to step back and realize that someone must be counted too. The second "Here." stands alone. It could be the speaker's reply, or a kind of echo, the whole morning answering back. The poem leaves that open. It is one of the few places where the plain language does double duty: "here" means both *present* and *in this place*.
That doubleness helps explain the title. "Firsts" is plural, and the poem suggests why: the first roll call of the year is also the first sighting of geese, the first crow, the first squirrel. Against that freshness, "Another New Year" sounds a little tired, even wry. The year is not new in any dramatic way, only in the sense that attention can start again.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it treats presence as an achievement. It offers no promise to change and no vow, only the plain act of showing up and noticing. The humor keeps it from being solemn, and the final "Here." is quiet but oddly moving. Its message is that a year can start with attention rather than ambition, and that being counted among the geese, the crow, the squirrel and the fog is enough to begin.