poems about humanity

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A few days ago I drove before dawn down Lake Street, the major city street that runs through south Minneapolis. It was dark. Nearly all the restaurants and bodegas and auto repair shops and gas stations were closed. But through the windows I could see the shadowy outlines of morning shift workers in the restaurant kitchens and storerooms, so many of them immigrants.

How many of them are terrified, here in this city where we have been invaded by our own government? How many of them can’t even risk coming to work, here where daily acts of vicious cruelty are making it hard to breathe?

Later that morning came the honks and whistles that mean the presence of ICE . Up and down the block people ran out, one in pajamas, all of us with our whistles and our phones. A friend texted me from an elementary school she was monitoring to make sure the kids and staff got in safely. Another stood vigil at the site of Renee Good’s murder. Later that afternoon I helped pack endless boxes of food for people who don’t have enough.

That night a friend texted me from the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant he was monitoring to make sure staff got home safe. And yesterday, so many thousands of Minneapolitans braved -11 degree weather to march in peaceful protest. All of us doing what we can, because we can, for the sake of strangers: human beings just like us.

For the Sake of Strangers, by Dorianne Laux

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another – a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them –
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

Click here for more information about Dorianne Laux, one of my favorite poets. Today’s poem first appeared in For the Sake of Strangers, publish in 1994 by BOA Editions.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter