Smallest Number

Beautiful lines from the poem Burning The Old Year by Naomi Shihab Nye

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.

There is something incredibly uplifting about starting at one.