Happy New Year! [poem, 1 January 1921]

[Editor: This poem was published in Smith’s Weekly (Sydney, NSW), 1 January 1921.]

Happy New Year!

Here’s to the New Year, solvent and gay,
Kicking his heels in the new-mown hay!

Here’s to the pessimist down the field
Who reckoned the rain would spoil the yield!

Here’s to the Old Year over the hill
Who ploughed the ground and sowed with a will.

Here’s to Prosperity! Plenty of fun
In Nineteen Hundred and Twenty One!

— KODAK.

Source:
Smith’s Weekly (Sydney, NSW), 1 January 1921, p. 10

Editor’s notes:
gay = happy, joyous, carefree (may also mean well-decorated, bright, attractive) (in modern times it may especially refer to a homosexual, especially a male homosexual; may also refer to something which is no good, pathetic, useless)

solvent = financially able to pay debts; having one’s accounts “in the black”, whereby assets and income outweigh liabilities and expenditure