It’s almost time to pack up and burn the old year. We’ve been thinking about a few words we read online the other day. It said: “I don’t want a new year this time, I want a gently used year.” We could use a gently used year, a simpler one where we were naive about the world and how it works. We hope you find words in this volume that help you go easy on yourself, let go of regrets, emerge from the Earth and find spring again.
I went out to hear by Leila Chatti
The sound of quiet. The sky
indigo, steeping
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before
the air troubled above
my head, turned to look
and saw them gone.
On the surface of the black
lake, a swan and the moon
stayed perfectly
still. I knew this was
a perfect moment.
Which would only hurt me
to remember and never
live again. My God. How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.
The trail of seeds by James Pearson
What started as flowers
are quickly becoming seeds,
brown and heavy on stalks
bent low to the earth.
I had a dream for my life.
It bloomed and withered
and left me laden with—
regrets, I thought, and fears.
For years the load I carried!
Until one day I found it
growing lighter on my shoulders,
and behind me a trail of seeds.
Snowdrops by Louise Glück
Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.
I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring–
afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.
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.
Regret Nothing by January Gill O’Neil
If at 4 a.m. you find yourself awake and alone,
curled up in your half-empty bed under a flashlight’s
white light reading a poem, little moon
casting its aura across the page, regret nothing:
not the clothes piled in the corner, not the drawers
closed like caskets, the unpacked lunches,
the bedtime story trapped in its book, the child’s glove
under the couch missing the body it protects-
all that must be swept, bundled, and carried off
to somewhere else, only to return to the source of your
unmaking. Regret nothing. Even as a glimmer
of yourself catches you in the mirror like a stranger,
walk into the day with your whole heart intact. Walk into
the center of everything. Leave nothing in your wake.
A Thousand Mornings 