You Know Who You Are by Naomi Shihab Nye
I read Words Under the Words last night. It’s such a fantastic collection of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poems! I think it’s an essential part of a poetry library. Here’s a sample. I love this poem because it describes how I feel about ESVM’s poetry. I think it’s so cool that another poet captured this feeling. Also, I just finished reading The Well of Lost Plots (the third Thursday Next book by Jasper Fforde) and it deals a lot with memories, so I thought this poem related to that, too.
You Know Who You Are
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Why do your poems comfort me, I ask myself.
Because they are upright, like straight-backed chairs.
I can sit in them and study the world as if it too
were simple and upright.
Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.
Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together,
they float.
I want to tell you about the afternoon
I floated on your poems
all the way from Durango Street to Broadway.
Fathers were paddling on the river with their small sons.
Three Mexican boys chased each other outside the library.
Everyone seemed to have some task, some occupation,
while I wandered uselessly in the streets I claim to love.
Suddenly I felt the precise body of your poems beneath me,
like a raft, I felt words as something portable again,
a cup, a newspaper, a pin.
everything happening had a light around it,
not the light of Catholic miracles,
the blunt light of a Saturday afternoon.
light in a world that rushes forward with us or without us.
I wanted to stop and gather up the blocks behind me
in this light, but it doesn’t work.
You keep walking, lifting one foot, then the other,
saying “This is what I need to remember”
and then hoping you can.
