Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

In a recurring dream, I’m running, long effortless bounds that somehow cover much more ground than is possible in waking life. Each time my foot touches down I spring up higher and longer, until I’m actually floating.

The dream turns unsettling once I’m beyond the reach of gravity, but until then all is lightness and freedom. A silent floating peace, earth and all its heaviness and worry far below.

Over the Weather, by Naomi Shihab Nye

We forget about the spaciousness
above the clouds

but it’s up there.The sun’s up there too.

When words we hear don’t fit the day,
when we worry
what we did or didn’t do,
what if we close our eyes,
say any word we love
that makes us feel calm,
slip it into the atmosphere
and rise?

Creamy miles of quiet.
Giant swoop of blue.

For more information on the wondrous Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.
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Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

IMG_8937Small, 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.

Salt and pepper grinders, Penzey’s Fox Point seasoning, a trivet that used to be my grandmother’s, cloth napkins each folded a different way to differentiate their owners, scuffs and burns from hot pots carelessly set down: this is our table, found curbside twenty years ago by me, who loved it at sight and for no apparent reason.

Now the table is leaving us, passed on to my daughter’s friend Shrimp, to be replaced by a kitchen island and four tall counter stools. When I sat at it yesterday eating a tomato sandwich, I thought of this beautiful poem.

 

Daily, by Naomi Shihab Nye

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of the sky

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world

 

 

 

 

 

For more information about Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

quilt, overviewThe 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. 

All these years since I bought that machine, I’ve wondered why I was so determined to get it when I was still surrounded by unpacked boxes and bags. I mean, a sewing machine? Strange. Now I think it represented security in a bewildering new place. Making friends had always been like breathing to me –easy, automatic, not something to think about–but it felt almost impossible when I moved to Minneapolis. Back then it was not the cosmopolitan city it is now, with young residents coming and going. People hung out with the same friends they’d had since kindergarten.

In retrospect, I was lonely, always trying to curb myself, be on the lookout, quiet my quick east coast way of speaking when out with my boyfriend and his friends. Maybe the sewing machine was something I could turn to for solace, something that the lonely girl I was could use to turn scraps of imaginary ideas and real fabric into something beautiful. Like the wondrous Naomi Nye says below, maybe it was a way to re-invent what my life had given me. 

 

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 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 off sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.    

 

Click here for more information about Naomi Shihab Nye.

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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Photos 223For years I’ve written haikus for people I don’t know. They send me a photo of someone and a few words about that person, along with $30, and I conjure up something about the person looking back at me from the photo. This takes some time. I want to get to something essential, something of this human being’s heart and soul. No one has ever sent me a photo of someone they don’t love dearly, and I respect that love and want the haiku to reflect it. Once it’s finished, I hand-letter the haiku on a piece of card stock and mail it back. All the proceeds go to support a school I’m involved with in Haiti. The photo/haiku/school forms an invisible triangle: 1) Me at my wooden desk gazing at 2) a photo of someone I don’t know in support of 3) both the sender and students, none of whom I’ve met in real life. You can’t order a poem like you order a taco, except sometimes you can. Poems are everywhere. Like the wondrous Ms. Nye says, 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 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 off sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

 

​For more information on ​Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.

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@alisonmcghee

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Luke and me, photo boothWhen 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. 

“I feel kind of dumb bringing him in,” I said, “but I just wanted to make sure.”

The doctor nodded. “It’s good you did bring him in,” he said. 

Then he went to the phone on the wall and called the hospital and asked them to reserve a room, that my son and I would be there shortly. I looked at him in bewilderment.

“The hospital?” I said, and he nodded. “Well, okay. I’ll go home and pack some clothes and”–but he shook his head. “Go now,” he said, gently. “Dehydration.”

So I went. And waited while the nurses and doctors sought to find a vein in my little boy’s small body, and then sat beside him for a couple of days while the i.v. dripped life-giving liquid into him. It was like watching a half-dead green plant revive. It took me a little while to realize that my baby had not been far from losing his life. I remembered how the doctor had pinched up the skin of his tiny belly, and how it had just stayed pinched up. I remembered how the doctor had gone immediately to the phone on the wall.

This doctor retired from active practice when my children were still small. Last week, for no known reason, the image of him flashed into my mind and I wondered where and how he was. It had been 20 years. Then, not two days later, I walked into my neighborhood bookstore to give a reading from my new novel, Never Coming Back, and just inside the door, there he was. He was older, still lean and small, still with those calm, observant eyes. He had seen that I was giving a reading, and he wanted to come. There was a lump in my throat as I hugged him.

That man is the kind of person that makes me think of this beautiful poem, one of my favorites, by Naomi Shihab Nye.

 

Famous
     – 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.

 

For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Naomi NyePeople who have been reading the poem of the week on this blog for years now must think, seeing this week’s selection, Wow, does this woman love Naomi Shihab Nye. And they would be right. Sometimes, walking down the street, I recite lines from her poems, maybe because they’re beautiful, maybe because they make me feel less alone, maybe because they remind me, always, that kindness is all that matters. At a restaurant a couple of weeks ago, a friend said to me, “I read a poem today that I think you would love. It’s by a woman named Naomi something”–and I said, “Naomi Shihab Nye!” Once, a couple of years ago, I saw a tiny notice in the paper that she was giving a talk that very night at a school near me –she lives in Texas and this was in Minneapolis– so I zipped right over. The talk was in a high school classroom and I sat in a chair in the front row. And afterward I asked if she minded a photo. So that’s me, with Naomi my hero, and this concludes my Naomi Shihab Nye story in favor of her beautiful poem, of which I love this line most of all: Each carries a tender spot: Something our lives forgot to give us. 

 

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, Sweden

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 my 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.

 

For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_5982I’m the mother of an immigrant and the aunt to immigrants. Family members and many of my dearest friends are gay. I am both a patron and former client of Planned Parenthood. I do not identify as Christian. These four facts alone make me –a white, middle-class born-and-bred citizen of this country– and my immediate and extended family current targets for persecution by my own government. Beyond that, many of my students, colleagues and friends are a) not white, b) Muslim, c) immigrants, d) people living with mental and physical disabilities. Being a patriotic American, which I most certainly am, means that my responsibility is to speak out against fascism. Being a progressive, which I also most certainly am, means keeping my focus on the bigger picture, which is the world as I know it to be, the one that Naomi Nye so beautifully brings to life in this poem.

Gate A-4, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to 
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just 
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I 
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A couple of years ago I read that Naomi Shihab Nye was going to be speaking at a local school that night, free, everyone welcome to attend. I zipped over and sat right in the front row of a small room and drank in everything she said and everything she read. If my favorite foods are what people call comfort food – things like potstickers, peanut butter cookies with the crisscross fork mark on top, soups simmered in a big cast iron pot – then Naomi Shihab Nye is the poetry equivalent of comfort food, but never in an anodyne or predictable way. She is a poet who begins with a thing, a real, tangible thing (and I am a writer who loves the thingness of things) and from that thing she somehow spirals a kite of words up into the air and stitches it to feelings and experience in a fearlessly human way that makes me feel more connected to the world.

The Rider
– Naomi Shihab Nye
A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

—

​For more information on , please click here​: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/naomi-shihab-nye

—
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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness” seared itself into my brain the first time I read it. She’s another of those poets to me, one whose name I google to see if she’s got another poem out there, one that I haven’t ever read before, let alone memorized. This particular poem makes me feel as if she’s with me throughout the day, happy in the same way, that feeling of secret love when the boiling water begins its steeping of the grounds, or the sheets and blankets are shaken out over the bed, or the sun slanting through the window makes soap bubble rainbows in the sink.

 

Daily
– Naomi Shihab Nye

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips
These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares
These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl
This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out
This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky
This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it
The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world.

—

​For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.​

—

My Facebook page.

Skin remembers how

Posted on by alisonmcghee

First touch, seventeen years ago. A hotel room in Hangzhou. 102 degree heat and a tiny baby in a striped split-pants outfit who has just been handed to you. Diaper rash. You take off her striped outfit and diaper and pull up your t-shirt and lay her down, stomach to stomach.

She sticks two fingers in her mouth and crinkles her dark eyes at you. You trace her sweaty little spine with one finger. Both of you are limp from the summer heat.

Hi, baby girl, you say.

Your skin and her skin, getting to know each other.

* * *

First kiss. The middle of the night. Rain drumming on a big tent in the woods by a river. Everyone asleep but you and the boy next to you. His hand silently smoothing your hair. The thrill of his skin-that-is-not-your-skin on yours. A quick smile the next morning, the brush of his fingers against yours under the picnic table.

* * *

Your elderly friend. The first time he’s left the big city in 37 years, the first time he’s been on a plane in 40. The first time he’s seen your house, sat at your kitchen table. He’s telling you how his mother used to rub the skin off boiled beans. He shows you with his fingers, rubbing them against his thumb.

“Like that,” he says.

You look at him, your shy and quiet friend who has lived his entire life in the same house, the one he lived in with his parents until they died, and suddenly you wonder if he has ever, even once, held a girl’s hand.

You reach across the table and hold his hand.

“You are precious to me,” you say. “Do you know that?”

He bends his head and nods.

* * *

“I was born in a body entirely covered and held together with skin,” writes your student. “And when I grew, my skin grew with me.”

You read her words and skin strikes you, for the first time, as alive. Of course it’s alive, you think, it’s an organ. It’s the largest organ in the body. But why did you never think of it as alive until just now?

You look at your hands, typing these words. At the veins like noodles just below the surface. At the scabs and scars and freckles and lines, none of which were there when you were born. You think of everything –the blood and muscles and bone and hidden organs– that your skin is protecting right now. Equal parts strength and fragility.

* * *

Your boy texts you a photo of his new tattoo. It takes you a while to comprehend it. Then: Wow, you text back.

It’s from the last lines of Book One of Paradise Lost, he writes. The most beautiful book I’ve ever read.

You imagine a long line of years stretching ahead of the skin that now holds his favorite words. You wonder how much it hurt, all those words, all those needles, all that ink.

The devil emerges from hell, he writes, and must pause to behold pure beauty for the first time.

You picture the scene, the devil, forced to stop and acknowledge the beauty of this world. You study the photo of your boy’s back and you remember it as it was the first time you saw him, when he was born. You carried him inside you while his skin was forming itself over that tiny, perfect body. You cried in fury and sorrow the first time a mosquito bit him. That first wound.

That is amazing, you message back. You amaze me.

Nothing for a few minutes. Then a small red heart appears on your screen.

* * *

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.

(Two Countries, by Naomi Shihab Nye)