2017 is here and yet, it will several more days of being a part of it before we all forget the old year that has just gone by. 2016, measured in celebrity deaths, wars and the extinction of various animal species seemed to be full of gloom, in a general sense, while we stood with the rest of the world and observed a series of catastrophes occur and, of course, experiencing, together, as one, the way the world shook each time something happened. But what about the experiences of 2016 which occurred on an individual level? What about the little things that happened over the past year? Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American poet and novelist and her poem, “Burning the Old Year” offers an accurate perception of how many people, on an individualistic level, and within themselves, would review the last year of their lives once January 1st has come.
“Letters swallow themselves in seconds. / Notes tied to the doorknob… sizzle like moth wings / marry the air”, found in the first stanza of the poem, are lines which convey destruction or the end of something. Letters and notes to friends are both indicators of messages that are transmitted between people who have relationships with each other and, perhaps, these relationships are sustained through those means of communication and yet, the poet presents us with imagery of the letters and notes being destroyed, being burnt as they “sizzle like moth wings” and turn into smoke when they become one with (marry) the air. The relation between the imagery in the first stanza and the passing of one year into another is obvious since relationships are a facet of each person’s individualism that are constantly refined and redefined each year, whether with them being altered (people grow apart from each other) or completely severed (people ending relationships with each other). These ideas about relationships are what Nye seems to be presenting in her poem, as she conveys the fragility of the notes and the letters and, by extension, the relationships themselves.
“So much of any year is flammable” begins the second stanza, which continues and expounds on the fire imagery that began in the first stanza. So much of any year is easily destroyed – both easily forgotten as a slip of the mind and forgotten as a deliberate, violent act upon the mind. When Nye writes that “So little is a stone” she is also pointing out that while there is much that we do each year that might be worthless, easily forgotten, or too fragile to make it into the new year and also that the things of real substance, the truly important things, the things that matter (the stones), that we engage in, that we create each year, are not a whole lot and that, in fact, is what give those moments and those things more worth than everything else that can be destroyed by the fire of the swirling year and the mind.
The sense of loss that comes with the New Year continues throughout the poem and is continuously manifested, for example, when the poet writes of “Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, / an absence shouts…” and such lines express the most vibrant theme that is found in the end of one year and the beginning of a new one: that of everything that has been lost and left behind, and yet, MUST be left behind, MUST be destroyed if the new year, and all the new things that come with it, are to be embraced. The great lesson in the poem seems to be, according to my mind, that everything that is trivial and incomplete must be destroyed through the act or forgetting. Only the stones, the solid things that actually have worth will remain and that is okay. By releasing ourselves from the trivialities of the past year, only then can we ensure that we get what we truly want and aim for in the New Year.