breaking the fast

by naomi shihab nye, from red suitcase

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 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.

during a war

by naomi shihab nye from you & yours

best wishes to you & yours

he closes the letter.

for a moment i can’t

fold it up again --

where does “yours” end?

dark eyes pleasing

what could we have done

differently?

your family,

your community,

circle of earth, we did not want,

we tried to stop,

we were not heard

by dark eyes who are dying

now. how easily they

would have welcomed us in

for coffee, serving it

in a simple room

with a radiant rug.

your friends & mine.

the story, around the corner

by naomi shihab nye from you & yours

is not turning the way you thought

it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,

the way a child draws the tail of a pig.

what came out of your mouth,

a riff of common talk.

as a sudden weather shift on a beach,

sky looming mountains of cloud

in a way you cannot predict

or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,

takes its own side. and it is strange.

far more complicated than a few phrases

pierced together around a kitchen table

on a july morning in dallas, say,

a city you don’t live in, where people

might shop forever or throw a thousand stories

away. you who carried or told a tiny bit of it

aren’t sure. is this what we wanted?

stories wandering out,

having their own free lives?

maybe they are planning something bad.

a scrap or cell of talk you barely remember

is growing into a weird body with many demands.

one day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,

knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

trying to name what doesn't change

by naomi shihab nye
 

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change   

is train tracks. She’s sure of it.

The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery   

by the side, but not the tracks.

I’ve watched one for three years, she says,

and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track

near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train   

is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.   

The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street

butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.   

The widow in the tilted house

spices her soup with cinnamon.

Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode.

The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.   

The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound   

but when it goes away, shrinking back

from the walls of the brain,

it takes something different with it every time.

snow, again

snow
by naomi shihab nye
Once with my scarf knotted over my mouth I lumbered into a storm of snow up the long hill and did not know where I was going except to the top of it. In those days we went out like that. Even children went out like that. Someone was crying hard at home again, raging blizzard of sobs. I dragged the sled by its rope, which we normally did not do when snow was coming down so hard, pulling my brother whom I called by our secret name as if we could be other people under the skin. The snow bit into my face, prickling the rim of the head where the hair starts coming out. And it was a big one. It would come down and down for days. People would dig their cars out like potatoes. How are you doing back there? I shouted, and he said Fine, I’m doing fine, in the sunniest voice he could muster and I think I should love him more today for having used it. At the top we turned and he slid down, steering himself with the rope gripped in his mittened hands. I stumbled behind sinking deeply, shouting Ho! Look at him go! as if we were having a good time. Alone on the hill. That was the deepest I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it when I stare at paper or into silences between human beings. The drifting accumulation. A father goes months without speaking to his son. How there can be a place so cold any movement saves you. Ho! You bang your hands together, stomp your feet. The father could die! The son! Before the weather changes.

two countries

Two Countries by naomi shihab nye

Skin remembers how long the years grow when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel of singleness, feather lost from the tail of a bird, swirling onto a step, swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather. Skin ate, walked, slept by itself, knew how to raise a see-you-later hand. But skin felt it was never seen, never known as a land on the map, nose like a city, hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope. Skin had hope, that's what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road. Love means you breathe in two countries. And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass, deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own. Even now, when skin is not alone, it remembers being alone and thanks something larger that there are travelers, that people go places larger than themselves.

the words under the words, by naomi shihab nye

The Words Under the Words
by Naomi Shihab Nye
for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem 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 is 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."

burning the old year by naomi shihab nye

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

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.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   

only the things I didn’t do   

crackle after the blazing dies. 

from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner Books, 1995)