#;oetry

[southernsagestoryteller]

Vada

Vada loved Kris Kristopherson, mountain country, scotch whiskey, and smoking pot – perhaps not in that order. She was aloof, indifferent to the opinions of other people, wild, and fragile. She was also my friend. I loved her but she scared me a little. There was always this little piece of me that knew she could go too far and that I might go with her. I met her during my college days in the…

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[dk-thrive]

Burning the Old Year

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.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye, Burning the Old Year from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995).