Poem of the Day

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.

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 just think this is a neat poem. I especially like the line: “I knew my mother’s eyes had tears they had not cried yet, I didn’t want to be the one to make them flow.”

Yellow Glove
By Naomi Shihab Nye

What can a yellow glove mean in a world of motorcars and
governments?

I was small, like everyone. Life was a string of precautions: Don’t
kiss the squirrel before you bury him, don’t suck candy, pop balloons,
drop watermelons, watch TV. When the new gloves appeared one
Christmas, tucked in soft tissue, I heard it trailing me: Don’t lose
the yellow gloves.

I was small, there was too much to remember. One day, waving at a
stream—the ice had cracked, winter chipping down, soon we would
sail boats and roll into ditches—I let a glove go. Into the stream,
sucked under the street. Since when did streets have mouths?
I walked home on a desperate road. Gloves cost money. We didn’t
have much. I would tell no one. I would wear the yellow glove that
was left and keep the other hand in a pocket. I knew my mother’s
eyes had tears they had not cried yet, I didn’t want to be the one
to make them flow. It was the prayer I spoke secretly, folding socks,
lining up donkeys in windowsills. To be good, a promise made to
the roaches who scouted my closet at night. If you don’t get in my
bed, I will be good. And they listened. I had a lot to fulfill.

The months rolled down like towels out of a machine. I sang and
drew and fattened the cat. Don’t scream, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t
fight—you could hear it anywhere. A pebble could show you how to
be smooth, tell the truth. A field could show how to sleep without
walls. A stream could remember how to drift and change—next
June I was stirring the stream like soup, telling my brother dinner
would be ready if he’d only hurry up with the bread, when I was it.
The yellow glove draped on a twig. A muddy survivor. A quiet flag.

Where had it been in the three gone months? I could wash it, fold it
in my winter drawer with its sister, no one in that world would ever
know. There were miracles on Harvey Street. Children walked
home in yellow light. Trees were reborn and gloves traveled far, but
returned. A thousand miles later, what can a yellow glove mean in a
world of bankbooks and stereos?

Part of the difference between floating and going down.

I thought this appropriate for Sunday.

Different Ways to Pray
By Naomi Shihab Nye

There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
Women dreamed wistfully of
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers, weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could
fuse them to the sky.

There were men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olive branches bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.

Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bent to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing baskets of grapes.

These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.
   Time? The old ones prayed for the young ones.
They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.

Naomi Shihab Nye just has a gift.

The Song
By Naomi Shihab Nye

From somewhere
a calm musical note arrives.
You balance it on your tongue,
a single ripe grape,
till your whole body glistens.
In the space between breaths
you apply it to any wound
and the wound heals.

Soon the nights will lengthen,
you will lean into the year
humming like a saw.
You will fill the lamps with kerosene,
knowing somewhere a line breaks,
a city goes black,
people dig for candles in the bottom drawer.
You will be ready. You will use the song like a match.
It will fill your rooms
opening rooms of its own
so you sing, I did not know
my house was this large.

I only have about 250 pages left in GWTW. I’m enjoying it so much! That has nothing to do with this poem, but here you go…

The Words Under the Words
(For Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem)
By Naomi Shihab Nye

My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,
the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.
When I was sick they followed me,
I woke from the long fever to find them
Covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother’s days are made of bread,
a round pat-pat and the slow baking.
She waits by the oven watching a strange car
circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,
lost to America. More often, tourists,
who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.
She knows how often mail arrives,
how rarely there is a letter.
When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,
listening to it read again and again
in the dim evening light.

My grandmother’s voice says
nothing can surprise her.
Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.
She knows the spaces we travel through,
the messages we cannot send—our voices are short
and would get lost on the journey.
Farewell to the husband’s coat,
the ones she has loved and nourished,
who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.
They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.
When she talks of the orchard
and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha
and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of His name.

“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—
otherwise it is just a world
with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets
full of stones.”

I love NSN because she can take a simple image and give it so much meaning.

Breaking My Favorite Bowl
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Some afternoons
thud unexpectedly
and split into four pieces
on the floor.

Two large pieces, two small ones.
I could glue them back,
but what would I use them for?

Forgive me when I answer you
in a voice so swollen
it won’t fit your ears.

I’m thinking about apples and histories,
the hands I broke off
my mother’s praying statue
when I was four—
how she tearfully repaired them,
but the hairline cracks
in the wrists
were all she said
she could see—

the unannounced blur
of something passing
out of a life.

I’m leaving for Kansas City today to see my dear Jennifer, David, Killy and Erin! I’m so excited!!! If only I didn’t have to be at work until 4pm…

Full Day
By Naomi Shihab Nye

The pilot on the plane says:
In one minute and fifty seconds
we’re going as far
as the covered wagon went
in a full day.
We look down
on clouds,
mountains of froth and foam.
We eat a neat
and subdivided lunch.
How was it for the people in
the covered wagon?
They bumped and jostled.
Their wheels broke.
Their biscuits were tough.
They got hot and cold and old.
Their shirts tore on the branches
they passed.
But they saw the pebbles
and the long grass
and the sweet shine of evening
settling on the fields.
They knew the ruts and the rocks.
They threw their furniture out
to make the wagons lighter.
They carried their treasures
in a crooked box.

I love this poem so much. It’s really hard to find the right ears…

You Have to Be Careful
By Naomi Shihab Nye

You have to be careful telling things.
Some ears are tunnels.
Your words will go in and get lost in the dark.
Some ears are flat pans like the miners used
looking for gold.
What you say will be washed out with the stones.

You look for a long time till you find the right ears.
Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to,
a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles,
and the slow, gradually growing possibility
that when you find such ears
they already know.

I know I post a lot of NSN’s poems, and I say things like this all the time, but I really love this poem! I’ve actually had a lot of conversations with my friends about perspective, and the last line of this poem really drives that home. Sometimes I feel selfish for not wanting to spend time with certain people in my acquaintance, but the bottom line is that if you don’t enjoy someone’s company, you don’t owe it to anyone to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation.

The Art of Disappearing
By Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say we should get together.
say why?

It’s not that you don’t love them any more.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

It’s about time for another Naomi Shihab Nye poem. I absolutely LOVE this one!

My Father and the Figtree
By Naomi Shihab Nye

For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He’d point at the cherry trees and say,
“See those? I wish they were figs.”
In the evening he sat by my beds
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
Even when it didn’t fit, he’d stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
“That’s not what I’m talking about! he said,
“I’m talking about a fig straight from the earth—
gift of Allah!—on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I’m talking about picking the largest, fattest, sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth.”
(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said.
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is. Look how many
things he starts and doesn’t finish.”

The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
“It’s a fig tree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.

After spending such a lovely weekend in the presence of greatness and hearing numerous speeches, I felt the need to post this poem. You can hear a reading of it by the second paddler from the National Canoe Journal.

Famous
By Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

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.

I love this poem! I read it to my mother when I was visiting and she really enjoyed it, too.

For Mohammed on the Mountain
By Naomi Shihab Nye

1.

Uncle Mohammed, you mystery, you distant secretive face,
lately you travel across the ocean and tap me on my shoulder
and say “See?” And I think I know what you are talking about,
though we have never talked, though you have never traveled anywhere
in twenty-five years, or anywhere anyone knows about.
Since my childhood, you were the one I cared for,
you of all the uncles, the elder brother of the family.
I’d pump my father, “But why did he go to the mountain?
What happened to him?” and my father, in his usual quiet way,
would shrug and say, “Who knows?”
All I knew was you packed up, you moved to the mountain,
you would not come down.
This fascinated me: How does he get food? Who does he talk to?
What does he do all day?
In grade school my friends had uncles who rode motorcycles,
who cooked steaks outdoors or paid for movies
I preferred you, in all your silence.
In my mind you were like a god, living close to clouds,
fearless and strong, with no one to sing you to sleep.
And I wanted to know you, to touch hands, to have you look at me
and recognize your blood, a small offspring
who did not find you in the least bit nuts.

2.

I wonder how much news you know. That Naomi, your sister
for whom I was partially named, Is dead.
That one brother shot himself “by mistake”—
that your brothers Izzat and Mufli have twenty-two
children already marrying each other.
That my father edits one of the largest newspapers in America
but keeps an Arabic inscription above his door, Ahlan Wa Sahlan,
a door you will never enter.

We came to your country, Uncle, we lived there a year
among sheep and stones, camels and fragrant oils,
and you would not come down to see us.
I think that hurt my father, though he never said so.
It hurt me, scanning the mountains for sight of your hut,
quizzing the relative and learning nothing.
Are you angry with us? Do you think my father forgot you
when he packed his satchel and boarded the ship?
Believe me, Uncle, my father is closer to you
thank you know. When he tends plants,
he walks slowly. His steps sing of the hills.
And when he stirs the thick coffee and grinds the cardamom seed
you think he feels like an American?
You think he forgets to call to prayer?

Oh Uncle, forgive me, how long is your beard?

3.

Maybe you had other reasons.
Maybe you didn’t go up the mountain
because you were angry.
This is what I ma learning, the voice I hear
when I wake at 3 a.m.
It says, Teach me how little I need to live
and I can’t tell if it is me talking, or you,
or the walls of the room. How little, how little,
and the world jokes and says, how much.
Money, events, ambitions, plans, oh Uncle,
I have made myself a quiet place in the swirl.
I think you would like it.
Yesterday I learned how many shavings of wood the knife discards
to leave one smoothly whittled spoon.
Today I read angles of light through the window,
first they touch the floor, then the bed,
till everything is luminous, curtains flung wide.
As for friends, they are fewer and dearer,
and the ones who remain seem also to be climbing mountains
in various ways, though we dreams we will meet at the top.
Will you be there?
Gazing out over valleys and olive orchards,
telling us sit, sit
you expected us all along.

This afternoon I loafed around the house with the fam. My mom had to iron my dad’s shirts, so I entertained her by reading poetry. I was certainly not mad at her today, but this poem reminded me of when I was a child and decided everyone hated me so I “ran away.” I hid in the woods for about half an hour and came back after no one came looking for me. (ha!) The truth is that my mother is amazing and she really “knows me so well.”

Mad
By Naomi Shihab Nye

I got mad at my mother
so I flew to the moon.
I could still see our house
so little in the distance
with its pointed roof.
My mother stood in the front yard
like a pin dot
searching for me.
She looked left and right for me.
She looked deep and far.
Then I whistled and she tipped her head.
It gets cold at night on the moon.
My mother sent up a silver thread
for me to slide down on.
She knows me so well.
She knows I like silver.

I think it’s time for another Naomi Shihab Nye poem.

Stain
By Naomi Shihab Nye

She scrubbed as hard as she could with a stone.
Dipping the cloth, twisting the cloth.
She knew the cloth much better than most,
having stitched its vines of delicate birds.

The red, the blue, the purple beaks.
A tiny bird with head held high.
A second bird with fanning wings.
Her fingers felt the folded hem.

The water in her pan was cool.
She stood outside by the lemon tree.
Children chattered around her there.
She told the children, “Take care! Take care!”

What would she think of the world today?
She died when she was one hundred and six.
So many stains would never come out.
She stared at the sky, the darkening rim.

She called out to the children, “Come in! Come in!”
She stood on the roof, tears on her face.
What was the thing she never gave up?
The simple love of her difficult place.

A friend of mine just lost someone close to him.

The Grieving Ring
By Naomi Shihab Nye

When word of his death arrived
we sat in a circle for days
crying or not crying

long ago in the other country
girls balanced buckets
on their heads

now the old sweet water
rose from the spring
to swallow us

brothers shrank
children grew old
it felt fine to say nothing
about him
or something small

the way he carried
oranges and falafel
in his pockets

the way he was always
slightly mad

what he said to each
the last time
we saw him
hurt the worst

those unwritten letters
banging each head
till it felt bruised

now he would stand at the mirror
knotting his tie
fort he rest of so many lives

Naomi Shihab Nye is truly amazing. She can write a poem about such a small thing and make it so beautiful and meaningful that you wonder why you never thought of it yourself.

Making a Fist
By Naomi Shihab Nye

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.