Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shehab 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.

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

Choices by Tess Gallagher I go to the mountain side of the house to cut saplings, and clear a view to snow on the mountain. But when I look up, saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in the uppermost branches. I don’t cut that one. I don’t cut the others either. Suddenly, in every tree,    an unseen nest where a mountain    would be.                          for Drago Štambuk

Tess Gallagher, "Choices" from Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2011 by Tess Gallagher.