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.
A new year has begun. The end of the year is often a time of reflection on things done and undone, those new born and those lost, and lots of lists with opinions of the best things from the past year. Another page in the history book is finished.
In "
The New Year" by Carrie Williams Clifford, the mood is optimistic.
The New Year comes —
fling wide,
fling wide the door
of Opportunity!
But for every person who views the new year optimistically with hope and opportunity, there is at least one other person who is glad to leave the old year behind.
In "Burning the Old Year" by Naomi Shihab Nye (from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems) we have a figurative fire that burns lists, notes and partial poems because "So much of any year is flammable... and so little is a stone." The burning is not in anger. I imagine the fire is not even intentional. Some things just burn themselves into the past and "only the things I didn’t do /
crackle after the blazing dies."
I once loaded a pile of notebooks, letters, and poems into my fire pit on a snowy January day. They were things that after years I had never returned to, never revised or never really felt good about writing or keeping. There were letters from past girlfriends, unfinished stories and poems, ideas for projects, clippings that I thought would inspire me. They made a fast and furious fire. A friend was shocked that I did such a thing. I explained that some of those things were saved electronically and might be useful but most of it had to be left in the past and having them made them keep creeping into the present.
What would you put in your fire in this new year from the past year? What are you letting go of from the past year? Your fire might be figurative or literal, or not a fire at all.
* Regular readers and submitters may recall that we used this poem in January 2022 along with a few other poems as a prompt about the year ending. We rarely repeat prompts, but this month we are taking what might seem to be a more pessimistic take on the poem - burning things from the past year. But letting go can be a good thing. Let us know.
Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University and continues to live.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes, including Grace Notes: Poems about Family, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East and Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1998. Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency (USIA) three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts.
Nye’s other honors include the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988, she received the Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award, judged by W. S. Merwin. In 2024, the Academy presented her with its Wallace Stevens Award.
Nye served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2009 to 2014, and was the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021.
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