Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye
The food share encourages volunteers to take home a bag of food for themselves. “I don’t feel right about that,” I said to my friend. “Why should I take a bag when I can afford to buy groceries?”
My friend looked at me calmly. “By not taking a bag, you set yourself apart from people who do. You implicitly demonstrate that those who volunteer here, the ones who can afford groceries, are somehow superior to those who come for food.”
This was one of those moments when the world suddenly pivoted a fraction of a degree for me. What is the current ICE occupation here but the action of people who perceive themselves to be superior?
Racism is core: the implicit assumption is that if your skin is not white and/or your English is accented, you are suspect. You can be hauled from your car, your school, your place of work, your asylum hearing, because you have been deemed automatically inferior by those currently in power in our administration.
Who am I to judge myself even remotely different from anyone else? I took a bag of food home with me and cooked up a big batch of soup to share with others. 
Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Click here for more information about Naomi Shihab Nye. Today’s poem is from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, published in 1995.
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My podcast: Words by Winter
Small, wooden, stained a peeling dark red-brown, our kitchen table has moved with us from apartment to condo to house. It’s too short, so over the years I’ve glued and re-glued blocks of wood to the bottom of each leg. My little kids did their homework on it while I cooked for them, my teenagers and their friends talked and laughed around it while I cooked for them, my grown children sit around it laughing and drinking wine while I cook for them. 
The day after I moved to Minneapolis, I bought a sewing machine. This was in the days of newspaper ads, and I found a used one for $60 and insisted my then-boyfriend and I track it down that very day. That ancient, impossibly heavy machine is what I’ve used to make all the quilts I’ve ever made, sewing together blocks I hand-stitch piecemeal. Story quilts, every one of them, made not according to a pattern but out of my head and heart. 
For years I’ve written 
When my son was a year and a half he came down with a stomach flu. After a couple of days the vomiting and diarrhea had calmed down, but he was quiet and listless. I wasn’t terribly worried but something told me to take him to the clinic, so I did. His doctor examined him in the little bright-lit room the same way I had grown used to, with calm and gentleness. I trusted this doctor completely and instinctively the minute I met him. He was older, small and lean, with wise eyes. 
Alison McGhee 