Spots are still available in the July 17-19 mini-session of our popular Write Together sessions, in which we gather on Zoom for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and write quietly together from a guided prompt. Cost: $100. Please click here for all the details. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room. 

People who read this Poem of the Week regularly must think, 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. Once a friend said to me, “I read a poem today that I somehow think you would love. It’s by a woman named…Naomi something?”–and I said, “Naomi Shihab Nye!”

She’s a poet who begins with a thing, a real, tangible thing like the stone in the poem below (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. She reminds me, always, that kindness is all that matters. She reminds me, always, that we’re all the same. That we each carry 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.