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Happy New Year to our devoted readers out there! I hope each and every one of you spent New Year’s Eve just as you wanted to spend it and with someone you love. <\/p>\nHappy New Year to our devoted readers out there! I hope each and every one of you spent New Year’s Eve just as you wanted to spend it and with someone you love. <\/p>\n
What better way to usher in the new year than with Naomi Shihab Nye<\/strong><\/a>, pictured here, a poet to whom I give my great adoration. I love what she captures in this poem I’m sharing below. Perhaps for some this would be a source of stress, the mass of Only the Things I Didn’t Do’s, as you look back on a year. To me, it’s very freeing. As one of my other favorite poets<\/strong><\/a> once wrote<\/strong><\/a> (well, singer\/songwriter, but I’d argue she’s a poet, too): “The zero in my hand \/ is nothing to lose \/ it’s hard to confuse power with love \/ love with power \/ everything that I’m not is all that I’ve got.”<\/em> Hey, you never know when you might need a zero (or simply a big sunny field<\/strong><\/a>). I say the first day of a new year is a good time for one. I love how its absence—and those sudden zeroes—shout and leave us a space, as Naomi puts it in “Burning the Old Year,” originally published in 1995’s Words Under the Words: Selected Poems<\/strong><\/a><\/em> (also mentioned before<\/strong><\/a> and once upon a time at 7-Imp). I’ll take those spaces—and what they offer us— over a list of resolutions any ‘ol day. And with gratitude. <\/p>\n Letters swallow themselves in seconds. So much of any year is flammable, You can read the rest here<\/strong><\/a>. <\/p>\n
\nNotes friends tied to the doorknob,
\ntransparent scarlet paper,
\nsizzle like moth wings,
\nmarry the air. <\/p>\n
\nlists of vegetables, partial poems.
\nOrange swirling flame of days,
\nso little is a stone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n