Republishing blog post from dead blog to a new blog

[csjb]

Hi,
I have a question that I can't seem to find the answer to. I had a blog for about a year that I abandoned after a handful of posts (less than 20). It didn't receive any real traffic to speak of (maybe like 3 people) but I believe Google did crawl it. I let the domain name expire this past July and am starting another blog that (I hope!) I won't abandon. Can I publish a few of the posts from the (now dead) blog on my new blog and not be considered having duplicate or copied content? Since I don't own the old domain, I can't set up redirects. It's highly unlikely the old domain would ever be purchased by anyone else--it was my full name which is very unusual. I could buy the old domain again, but if I don't need to, I'd rather not.
Thanks for your help!