Poem of the Day

There’s no point in saving this to post in the morning because I never seem to get the PotD up in the morning. I’ll read NSN’s poetry any time of day, though! My favorite line is Remember your deepest name.

Breaking the Fast
By Naomi Shihab Nye

1.

Japanese teacher says:
At first light, rise.
Don’t hover between
sleep and waking,
this makes you heavy,
puts a stone inside your heart.

The minute you drift back to shore,
anchor. Breathe.
Remember your deepest name.

2.

Sometimes objects stun me,
bamboo strainer, gray mug,
sitting exactly where
they were left.

They have not slept
or dreamt of lost faces.

I touch them carefully,
saying, tell me what you know.

3.

Cup of waves,
strawberry balanced
in a seashell.

In morning the water seems
clear to the bottom.

No fish blocks my view.

I’ve been on hiatus for so long, that I feel I need to share poems from my favorites, so here’s one from NSN.

Alone
By Naomi Shihab Nye

He grows used to the sound of the floor
Not yet   Not yet   each evening
right before the news comes on.

Then the killing and the stabbing
and the beating and the crashing.
Turn it off. There’s a smudge on the wall,
a Jesus with a blazing heart.

His coffee cup waits
upside down on its plate.
The shape of dinner tastes upside down.
He eats whatever the nurse-lady left him,
the hamburger in its three-day shirt.
Sometimes he doesn’t know the name
of what he eats.

He hauls his body to the porch,
sinks his eyes into the weeds.
A hose curls in the lilies.
If he could reach it,
make it down
those three crooked steps…

When his wife died he was very quiet
for one day. Then he smiled
and smiled with his two teeth
for the bad time they had
that was over.

His tongue could sound Soledad or Solamente
for his bones and his blood and his few good hairs.

When the drop of water on the white sink
meets the next drop and they are joining,
he thinks of other ways to spend this life
that he didn’t do. He would like to meet them.

I just realized that it’s been quite a while since I posted a poem from NSN.

Fundamentalism
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Because the eye has a short shadow or
it is hard to see over heads in the crowd?

If everyone else seems smarter
but you need your own secret?

If mystery was never your friend?

If one way could satisfy
the infinite heart of the heavens?

If you liked the king on his golden throne
more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons?

If you wanted to be sure
his guards would admit you to the party?

     The boy with the broken pencil
     scrapes his little knife against the lead
     turning and turning it as a point
     emerges from the wood again

     If he would believe his life is like that
     he would not follow his father into war

As an incurable bookworm, this poem really appeals to me. I know that I will never be able to read all the books I want to and, though I do maintain a list, I think it’s wonderful to get new recommendations and stumble across books from unlikely sources. As OCD and obsessed with lists as I am, my book list is not written in stone.

The List
By Naomi Shihab Nye

A man told me he had calculated
the exact number of books
he would be able to read before he died
by figuring the average number
of books he read per month
and his probable earth span,
(averaging how long
his dad and grandpa had lived,
adding on a few years since he
exercised more than they did).
Then he made a list of necessary books,
nonfiction mostly, history, philosophy,
fiction, and poetry from different time periods
so there wouldn’t be large gaps in his mind.
He had given up frivolous reading entirely.
There are only so many days.

Oh, I felt sad to hear such an organized plan.
What about the books that aren’t written yet,
the books his friends might recommend
that aren’t on the list,
the yummy magazine that might fall
into his hand at a silly moment after all?
What about the mystery search
through the delectable library shelves?
I felt the heartbeat of forgotten precious books
calling for his hand.

It’s been a very long and tiring day and I wanted to post something that made me smile. Also, a friend and I were just talking about eye tests yesterday, so this seems apropos.

Eye Test
By Naomi Shihab Nye

The D is desperate.
The B wants to take a vacation,
live on a billboard, be broad and brave.
The E is mad at the R for upstaging him.
The little c wants to be a big C if possible,
and the P pauses long between thoughts.

How much better to be a story, story.
Can you read me?

We have to live on this white board
together like a neighborhood.
We would rather be the tail of a cloud,
one letter becoming another,
or lost in a boy’s pocket
shapeless as lint,
the same boy who squints to read us
believing we convey a secret message.
     Be his friend.
We are so tired of meaning nothing.

Have I mentioned I love Naomi Shihab Nye? Once or twice, perhaps… Anyway, I love this poem because it imbues a simple subject (a pencil) with more significance than I would have thought possible. Also, as a nerdy chemist, I prefer writing in pencil when I’m doing calculations because I often have to make adjustments and/or corrections. (Not quite as romantic as Nye’s reasoning, I’m sure.)

Always Bring a Pencil
By Naomi Shihab Nye

There will not be a test.
It does not have to be
a Number 2 pencil.

But there will be certain things—
the quiet flush of waves,
ripe scent of fish,
smooth ripple of the wind’s second name—
that prefer to be written about
in pencil.

It gives them more room
to move around.

I have to admit that both my mother and I love doing crossword puzzles. I used to do the NYT puzzle with my grandfather when I was a little girl. My uncle and I used to do the puzzle when I lived in Austin. So what does that say about nature vs. nurture?

Genetics
By Naomi Shihab Nye

From my father I inherited the ability
to stand in a field and stare.

Look, look at that gray dot by the fence.
It’s his donkey. My father doesn’t have
a deep interest in donkeys, more a figurative one.
To know it’s out there nuzzling the ground.

That’s how I feel about my life.
I like to skirt the edges. There it is in the field.
Feeding itself.

*

From my mother, an obsession about the stove
and correct spelling. The red stove, old as I am, must be
polished at all times. You don’t know this about me.
I do it when you’re not home.

The Magic Chef gleams in his tipped hat.
Oven shoots to 500 when you set it low.
Then fluctuates. Like a personality.

Thanks to my mother I now have an oven thermometer
but must open the oven door to check it.
Even when a cake’s in there. Isn’t that supposed to be
disaster for a cake?

My mother does crosswords, which I will never do.
But a word spelled wrongly anywhere
prickles my skin. Return to beginning
with pencil, black ink.
Cross you at the “a.” Rearrange.
We had family discussions
about a preference for the British grey.

In the spelling bee I tripped on reveille,
a bugle call, a signal at dawn.
I have risen early
ever since.

Yet another brilliant example of NSN’s ability to take a very simple image and tell a beautiful story about it.

Supple Cord
By Naomi Shihab Nye

My brother, in his small white bed,
held one end,
I tugged the other
to signal I was still awake.
We could have spoken,
could have sung
to one another,
we were in the same room
for five years,
but the soft cord
with its little frayed ends
connected us
in the dark,
gave comfort
even if we had been bickering
all day.
When he fell asleep first
and his end of the cord
dropped to the floor,
I missed him terribly,
though I could hear his even breath
and we had such long and separate lives
ahead.

I realize I say this all the time, but I just can’t get over the awesomeness of Naomi Shihab Nye’s writing. She often manages to put a spin on something that I’d never considered and express her point with powerful eloquence. This poem is certainly no exception to that!

For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15
By Naomi Shihab Nye

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don’t gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying—friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

My power went out at about midnight, during a humdinger of a storm, and it was only restored sometime between 5:30 and 8:30pm tonight (I went out to dinner someplace with lights and air conditioning!). Also, I’m embarking on a cross country move tomorrow so the PotD may continue during transit, or it may not. I’ll do my best!

Isle of Mull, Scotland
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Because by now we know everything is not so green elsewhere.

The cities tied their nooses around our necks,
we let them without even seeing.

Not even feeling our breath soften
as clumps of shed wool scattered across days.

Not even. This even-ing, balance beam of light on green,
the widely lifted land, resonance of moor
winding down to water, the full of it. Days of cows
and sheep bending their heads.

We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.

Where else do we ever have to go, and why?

I need to hear from Naomi today.

Changed
By Naomi Shihab Nye

They said something mean about me
and didn’t notice it was mean.

So my heart wandered
into the rainy night without them
and found a canopy
to hind under.

My eyes started
seeing through things.
Like gauze.
Old self through new self.
My flexible body
went backwards
and forwards
in time.

It’s hard to describe but true:
I grew another head
with better ideas
inside my old head.

One of the PotD readers sent me this poem. It’s actually in Words Under the Words, a poetry collection I consider essential to my library, but I hadn’t posted it before. I love rediscovering poems or reading them in a totally different light.

So Much Happiness
By Naomi Shihab Nye

for Michael

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Current Tea: margarita (black tea with flavors of lime and salt)

I just realized we’re way overdue for another one from NSN! I’ve read this poem before, but revisiting it just reminds me how much I absolutely love NSN. This is short, simple, and perfectly descriptive of how I’ve felt sometimes when my high hopes didn’t come to fruition.

High Hopes
By Naomi Shihab Nye

It wasn’t that they were so
high, exactly,
they were more
low-down,
close-to-the-ground,
I could rub them
the way you touch a cat
that rubs against your ankles
even if he isn’t yours.

So yes I feel lonely without them.
Now that I know the truth,
that I only dreamed someone liked me,
the cat has curled up in a bead of leaves
against the house and I still have to do
everything I had to do before
without a secret hum
inside.

Current Tea: winter dreams (black tea with chocolate flavoring and peppermint leaves)

Here’s a little bit of prose that made me smile.

Please Describe How You Became a Writer
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first grade text book. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?

Current Tea: chocolate rum (black tea with chocolate and rum flavoring)

I had a really wonderful conversation with a friend tonight and I wanted to post this poem because it fits with some of the things we discussed.

A Way Around
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Argument
is a room I won’t enter.
Some of us
would circle a whole house
not to enter it.

If you want to talk like that,
try a tree.
A tree is patient.
Don’t try me.

High time we heard from NSN again! (I can never get enough…)

Shoulders
By Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

Oh, how I love Naomi Shihab Nye! It never fails to amaze me how she can take a simple and/or unremarkable object/image/etc. and turn it into something beautiful and meaningful. I don’t even use a flour sifter and I love this poem!

Sifter
By Naomi Shihab Nye

When our English teacher gave
our first writing invitation of the year,
Become a kitchen implement
in 2 descriptive paragraphs, I did not think
butcher knife or frying pan,
I thought immediately
of soft flour showering through the little holes
of the sifter and the sifter’s pleasing circular
swishing sound, and wrote it down.
Rhoda became a teaspoon,
Roberto a funnel,
Jim a muffin tin
and Forrest a soup pot.
We read our paragraphs out loud.
Abby was a blender. Everyone laughed
and acted giddy but the more we thought about it,
we were all everything, in the whole kitchen,
drawers and drainers,
singing teapot and grapefruit spoon
with serrated edges, we were all the
empty cup, the tray.
This, said our teacher, is the beauty of metaphor.
It opens doors.
What I could not know then
was how being a sifter
would help me all year long.
When bad days came
I would close my eyes and feel them passing
through the tiny holes.
When good days came
I would try to contain them gently
the way flour remains
in the sifter until you turn the handle.
Time, time. I was a sweet sifter in time
and no one ever knew.

Current Tea: Diva blend (Ceylon black tea with hints of hazelnut and chocolate)

I know I’ve said it before (many times probably), but words cannot express how much I love Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry. I can relate to this poem especially since I’ve been escaping into fiction more and more lately.

Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things
By Naomi Shihab Nye

She is holding the book close to her body,
carrying it home on the cracked sidewalk,
down the tangled hill.
If a dog runs at her again, she will use the book as a shield.

She looked hard among the long lines
of books to find this one.
When they start talking about money,
when the day contains such long and hot places,
she will go inside.
An orange bed is waiting.
Story without corners.
She will have two families.
They will eat at different hours.

She is carrying a book past the fire station
and the five and dime.
What this town has not given her
the book will provide; a sheep,
a wilderness of new solutions.
The book has already lived through its troubles.
The book has a calm cover, a straight spine.

When the step returns to itself,
as the best place for sitting,
and the old men up and down the street
are latching their clippers,

she will not be alone.
She will have a book to open
and open and open.
Her life starts here.

Even though this mentions grass rather than wildflowers, I’m dedicating it to Lady Bird Johnson. Driving the roads in Texas always makes me think of her and I suspect that she was one to pause from time to time…

Pause
By Naomi Shihab Nye

The boy needed
to stop by the road.
What pleasure to let
the engine quite droning
inside the long heat,
to feel where they were.
Sometimes
she was struck by this
as if a plank had slapped
the back of her head.

They were thirsty
as grasses
leaning sideways
in the ditch,
Big Bluestream
and Little Barley,
Texas Cupgrass,
Hairy Crabgrass,
Green Sprangletop.
She could stop at a store
selling only grass names
and be happy.

They would pause
and the pause
seep into them,
fence post,
twisted wire,
brick chimney
without its house,
pollen taking flight
toward the cities.

Something would gather
back into place.
Take the word “home”
for example,
often considered
to have an address.
How it could sweep across you
miles beyond the last
neat packages of ice
and nothing be wilder
than its pulse.
Out here,
everywhere,
the boy looking away from her
across the fields.

It’s time we heard from NSN again.

What is Supposed to Happen
By Naomi Shihab Nye

When you were small,
we watched you sleeping,
waves of breath
filling your chest.
Sometimes we hid behind
the wall of baby, soft cradle
of baby needs.
I loved carrying you between
my own body and the world.

Now you are sharpening pencils,
entering the forest of
lunch boxes, little desks.
People I never saw before
call out your name
and you wave.

This loss I feel,
this shrinking,
as your field of roses
grows and grows…

Now I understand history.
Now I understand my mother’s
ancient eyes.

I’ll be out of internet contact until Sunday afternoon (gasp) so no PotD tomorrow. Instead, I’ll leave you with one from NSN today, since she’s so amazing she should count for two days!

I Feel Sorry for Jesus
By Naomi Shihab Nye

People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
But I bet some days He regrets it.

Cozily they tell you what he wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember “Telephone,” that pass-it-on game

where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.

They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.

He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers

and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.

I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.

And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.

I always find Naomi Shihab Nye comforting.

My Grandmother in the Stars
By Naomi Shihab Nye

It is possible we will not meet again
on earth. To think this fills my throat
with dust. Then there is only the sky
tying the universe together.

Just now the neighbor’s horse must be standing
patiently, hoof on stone, waiting for his day
to open. What you think of him,
and the village’s one heroic cow
is the knowledge I wish to gather.
I bow to your rugged feet,
the moth-eaten scarves that knot your hair.

Where we live in the world
is never one place. Our hearts,
those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us
moons before we are ready for them.
You and I on a roof at sunset,
our two languages adrift,
heart saying, Take this home with you,
never again,
and only memory making us rich.

I haven’t had time to bake bread in quite a while and I miss it. I’m looking forward to baking this weekend.

Yeast
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Each morning from the dim secrecy
of the school kitchen, that single scent
sweetens the day—rectangles already baking,
legions of bread on long silver trays.
Like history, it won’t stop happening.
Bread spreading its succulent flesh
whatever we learn or unlearn
in the room with faded snapping maps.

Once the map flipped up so hard
Greenland caught me on the jaw
and I had to go to the health room.

Lying on the small cot,
closing my eyes under the ice bag,
I could smell the bread better from there.

Sometimes it seemed so obvious.
I should have been a slab of butter,
the knife that cuts, the door
to the oven.

This one’s for all the older siblings out there…

What She Was Doing At Home
By Naomi Shihab Nye

                     School was like a ship they
                     sent you away upon.
                     —Michael Burkard

The baby was there—unfair.
I knew whatever she was doing
had fluted edges, a cinnamon center.
I knew she placed snipped rounds of waxed paper
between layers of cookies in the tin.

And I was missing it,
missing everything.
As far away as the monkey
in a rocket.

After school, when I tried to swim back
into her day, she had left it already.
She was washing up on the shores of dinner,
wearing a cool rag pressed between her eyes.

We read this one over Thanksgiving, from my aunt’s copy of Red Suitcase. I really love the lines:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Valentine For Ernest Mann
By Naomi Shihab Nye

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell you a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

Today’s poem is for my mother, a fellow tea-lover.

The Tray
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Even on a sorrowing day
the little white cups without handles
would appear
filled with steaming hot tea
in a circle on the tray,
and whatever we were able
to say or not say,
the tray would be passed,
we would sip
in silence,
it was another way
lips could be speaking together,
opening on the hot rim,
swallowing in unison.

I haven’t posted one by NSN in a while…

What He Said to His Enemies
By Naomi Shihab Nye

He could hear them off in the forest,
massive branches breaking:
you are no good, will never be any good.

Sometimes they followed him,
rubbing out his tracks.
They wanted him to get lost
in the world of trees,
stand silently forever, holding up his hands.

At night he watched
the streetlamp’s light
soaking into his lawn.
He could bathe in its cool voice,
roll over to a whole different view.
What made them think
the world’s room was so small?

On the table he laid out his clothes,
arranging the cuffs.
What he said to his enemies
was a window pushed high as it would go.
Come in, look for me where you think
I am. Then when you see no one is there,
we can talk.

Keeping with the theme of November (in March, of course)…

What People Do
By Naomi Shihab Nye

November    November    November    the days crowd together
like families of leaves    in a dry field
I pick up a round stone    take it to my father
who lies in bed waiting for his heart to mend
and he turns it over and over in his hands

My father is writing me the story of his village
He tells what people did    in another country
before I was born    how his best friend was buried alive
and the boy survived two days in the ground
how my father was lowered into a well on ropes    to discover
clay jars a thousand years old    how each jar held seeds
carob and melon    and the villagers chose secrecy
knowing the British would come with trucks and dig up their town

My father’s handwriting changes from page to page
sometimes a wild scrawl and disconnected letters
sometimes a new serious upward slant

And me    I travel the old roads again and again
wearing a different life in a house surrounded by trees
At night the dropping pecans make little clicks above us
Doors closing

More and more I understand what people do
I appreciate the daily braveries    clean white shirts
morning greetings between old men

Again I see how    once the boat tips    you never forget
the sensation of drowning
even if you sing yourself the familiar songs

Today my face is stone    my eyes are buckets
I walk the streets lowering them into everything
but they come up empty

I would tell my father
    I cannot move one block without you
    I will never recover from your love
yet I stand by his bed saying things I have said before
and he answers    and we go on this way
smoothing the silences
nothing can heal

I don’t have a little brother, though I have two younger sisters. I love this poem because it seems so brutally honest.

The Little Brother Poem
By Naomi Shihab Nye

I keep seeing your car in the streets
but it never turns at our corner. I keep finding
little pieces of junk you saved, a packing box, a white rag,
and stashed in the shed for future uses. Today I am cleaning
the house. I take your old camping jug, poke my finger
through the rusted hole in the bottom, tack it on the trash
wondering if you’d yell at me, if you had other plans for it.

Little brother, when you were born I was glad. Believe this.
There is much you never forgave me for but I tell you now,
I wanted you.

It’s true there are things I would change. Your face bleeding
the day you followed me and I pushed you in front of a bicycle.
For weeks your eyes hard on me under the bandages. For years
you quoted me back to myself, mean things I’d said that I didn’t
remember. Last summer you disappeared into the streets of Dallas
at midnight on foot crying and I realized you’d been serious,
some strange bruise you still carried under the skin.

You’re not little anymore. You passed me up and kept reminding me
I’d stopped growing. We’re different, always have been,
you’re Wall Street and I’m the local fruit market,
you’re Pierre Cardin and I’m a used bandanna.
That’s fine, I’ll take differences over things that match.

If you were here today we wouldn’t say this.
You’d be outside cranking up the lawnmower.
I’d be in here answering mail.
You’d pass through the house and say “You’re a big help”
and I’d say “Don’t mention it” and the door would close.

I think of the rest of our lives. You’re on the edge of yours today.
Long-distance I said “Are you happy?” and your voice wasn’t sure.
It sounded small, younger, it sounded like the little brother
I don’t have anymore, the one who ran miniature trucks up my arms
telling me I was a highway, the one who believed me
when I told him monkeys arrived in the night to kidnap boys
with brown hair. I’m sorry for everything I did that hurt.
It’s a large order I know, dumping out a whole drawer at once,
fingering receipts and stubs, trying to put them back
in some kind of shape so you’ll be able to find everything later,
when you need it, and you don’t have so much time.

I can’t say this enough. Naomi Shihab Nye just blows me away. She’s amazing!

Remembered
By Naomi Shihab Nye

He wanted to be remembered so he gave people things
they would remember him by. A large trunk, handmade of
ash and cedar. A tool box with initials shaped of scraps.
A tea kettle that would sing every morning,
antique glass jars to fill with crackers, noodles, beans.
A whole family of jams he made himself from the figs and berries
that purpled his land.

He gave these things unexpectedly. You went to see him
and came home loaded. You said “Thank you” till your lips
grew heavy with gratitude and swelled shut.
Walking with him across the acres of piney forest,
you noticed the way he talked to everything, a puddle, a stump,
the same way he talked to you.
“I declare you do look purty sittin’ there in that field
reflectin’ the light like some kind of mirror, you know what?”
As if objects could listen.
As if earth had a memory too.

At night we propped our feet by the fireplace
and laughed and showed photographs and the fire remembered
all the crackling music it knew. The night remembered
how to be dark and the forest remembered how to be mysterious
and in bed, the quilts remembered how to tuck up under our chins.
Sleeping in that house was like falling down a deep well,
rocking in a bucket all night long.

In the mornings we’d stagger away from an unforgettable breakfast
of biscuits—he’d lead us into the next room
ready to show us something or curl another story into our ear.
He scrawled the episodes out in elaborate longhand
and gave them to a farmer’s wife to type.
Stories about a little boy and a grandfather,
chickens and prayer tents, butter beans and lightning.
He was the little boy.
Some days his brain could travel backwards easier than it could
sit in a chair, right there.

When we left he’d say “Don’t forget me! You won’t forget me now,
will you?” as if our remembering could lengthen his life.
I wanted to assure him, there will always be a cabin in our blood
only you live in. But the need of remembrance silenced me,
a ringing rising up out of the soil’s centuries, the ones
who plowed this land, whose names we do not know.

It’s been quite a while since I posted one by Naomi Shihab Nye…

Jerusalem
By Naomi Shihab Nye

“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
—Tommy Olofsson

I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.

Once when my father was a boy
a stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.

Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
“I am native now.”
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child’s poem says,
“I don’t like wars,
they end up with monuments.”
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.

If you tilt your head just slightly
it’s ridiculous.

There’s a place in this brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.

It’s late but everything comes next.