so much of any year is flammable

Today is April 1, which on general principle is a day I try to stay off the internet, because people are really terrible about April Fool's Day. However, today is also the first day of National Poetry Month in the U.S., a holiday I have been celebrating for twelve years. This is the thirteenth year! My National Poetry Month posts are getting Bat Mitzvahed this year! 

I'm still taking requests and suggestions, although I've also planned out a lot of the month—poetry month is always a complicated mix of planned and spontaneous, and this year is no different. If you're new to my poetry month posts, I try to post a poem a day for the month of April (with varying degrees of success), and I try not to repeat poems I have posted before, but I never promise not to break my own rules. 

Let's start, this year, with 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.

—Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), "Burning the Old Year," from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland: Far Corner Books, 1995).