Burning the Old Year (Naomi Shihab Nye)

Happy New Year!  I'm trying to decide what I feel about this new year and the loss of the last one.  For me, there is always something bittersweet about the loss of a year.  Do you remember when we couldn't wait for the next year?  I do, I do-- wanting to be a teenager, wanting to go to college, and on and on and on.  Now, I realize this year is the end of our family life as we've known it for so long--Will is off to college in the fall, and we will have to figure out how to be in this new space of three instead of four.  Last year wasn't the best for health and happiness around here so we should be happy to burn 2009 and move on, but.....there is always that but, things are always a bit more complicated, aren't they.  But  I am ever hopeful, dare I even say happy, and looking at these kids makes me sure that with all our "stuff", we have done all right. They are happy, thoughtful, loving and wise.  This seems like a good place to start a new year to me.

Try this:

Burning the Old Year

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,   

lists of vegetables, partial poems.   

Orange swirling flame of days,   

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,   

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.   

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   

only the things I didn’t do   

crackle after the blazing dies.