Dedication
For Connor James Nye and Virginia Duncan
In memory, Paula Merwin, Paul Rode, Bill Hanson,
Thomas Lux, James Tolan, Catherine Kasper, Brother Tony Hearn
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
SECTION I: MESSAGES
To Manage
Aurora Borealis
Propriety
Big Bend National Park Says No to All Walls
Time’s Low Note
Bully
Invocation
Bamboo Mind
Cross the Sea
To Babies
Songbook
Unsung—on Finding
Bundle
Little Lady, Little Nugget Brooms
Welcome What Comes
What Happens Next
Everything Changes the World
Standing Back
Three Hundred Goats
Lost People
Broken
Twilight
SECTION II: VOICES IN THE AIR
For Aziz
Sheep by the Sea, a painting by Rosa Bonheur (1865)
Emily
Warbler Woods
Gratitude Pillow
Life Loves
Getting Over It
Conversation with Grace Paley, Flight of the Mind Writing Workshop, Oregon
Showing Up
For Caroline M.
Tomorrow
After Listening to Paul Durcan, Ireland
We Will Get Lost in You
James Tate in Jerusalem
Train Across Texas
Longfellow’s Bed
Walt Whitman’s Revisions
“Rest and Be Kind, You Don’t Have to Prove Anything”
Peace Pilgrim’s Pocket
C. D. Stepped Out
True Success
Woven by Air, Texture of Air
Tell Us All the Gossip You Know
Every Day
One State
My Name Is . . .
Invitation to the NSA
Double Peace
Break the Worry Cocoon
The Tent
Please Sit Down
For the Birds
Bowing Candles
Black Car
SECTION III: MORE WORLDS
Mountains
Oh, Say Can You See
Anti-Inaugural
I Vote for You
Belfast
Summer
A Lonely Cup of Coffee
Reading Obituaries on the Day of the Giant Moon
To Jamyla Bolden of Ferguson, Missouri
Your Answering Machine, After Your Death
Ring
Hummingbird
Next Time Ask More Questions
In Transit
Zen Boy
Where Do Poets Find Images?
Cell Phone Tower Disguised as a Tree
Before I Was a Gazan
Morning Ablution
What Do Palestinians Want?
Arabs in Finland
Ladders in Repose
The Gift
Voodoo Spoons
Barbershop
Getaway Car, United States, 2017
“Little Brother Shot Playing with Pistol”
Moment of Relief
Unbelievable Things
Airport Life
Texas, Out Driving
Missing the Boat, Take Two
All We Will Not Know
Loving Working
Stars Over Big Bend
United
Reserved for Poets
Her Father Still Watching
Small Basket of Happiness
Biographical Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Naomi Shihab Nye
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Poet Galway Kinnell said, “To me, poetry is someone standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
Someone—Abraham Lincoln?—once remarked that all the voices ever cast out into the air are still floating around in the far ethers—somehow, somewhere—and if we only knew how to listen well enough, we could hear them even now.
Voices as guides, lines and stanzas as rooms, sometimes a single word the furniture on which to sit . . . each day we could open the door, and enter, and be found. These days I wonder—was life always strange—just strange in different ways? Does speaking some of the strangeness help us survive it, even if we can’t solve or change it?
Where is my map—where are we, please? Can voices that entered into our thoughts when we were little help us make amends with the strange time we’re in?
William Stafford, great twentieth-century American poet and teacher, tireless encourager of dialogue and nonviolence, is still speaking in the slant shadows falling across the path. If we only knew how to listen better, he said, even the grasses by the roadsides could help us live our lives. They’re flexible, for one. What might he say about our current moments in history? Would he be surprised by the divisive rhetoric, mysterious backsliding? Or not surprised at all?
When I see a highway sign, “No Right Turn onto Whirlwind Drive”—Stafford comes to mind. He carried a decisive calm.
Peter Matthiessen, the only American writer ever to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, is still standing out on his Long Island beach, staring at the sky, asking us, Did you see that? Flying over just now? Did you catch the span of the wings, the rosy tip of the head?
Might we pause on our way to everywhere we are rushing off to and hear something in the air, old or new, that would make sense?
Not so long ago we were never checking anything in our hands, scrolling down, pecking with a finger, obsessively tuning in. My entire childhood did not involve a single deletion. These are relatively new acts on earth.
In those archaic but still vivid days, there might be a meandering walk into trees, an all-day bike ride, a backyard picnic, a gaze into a stream, a plunge into a sunset, a conversation with pines, a dig in the dirt, to find our messages. When we got home, there was nothing to check or catch up on—no one speaking to us in our absence.
Recently, when I had the honor of visiting Yokohama International School in Japan to conduct poetry workshops, student Juna Hewitt taught me an important word—Yutori—“life-space.” She listed various interpretations for its meaning—arriving early, so you don’t have to rush. Giving yourself room to make a mistake. Starting a diet, but not beating yourself up if you eat a cookie after you started it. Giving yourself the possibility of succeeding. (Several boys in another class defined the word as when the cord for your phone is long enough to reach the wall socket.) Juna said she felt that reading and writing poetry gives us more yutori—a place to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.
I love this. It was the best word I learned all year.
Not that sense of being nibbled up—as if message minnows surround us at all moments, nipping, nipping at our edges.
Perhaps we have more voices in the air now—on TV, in our phones and computers and little saved videos—but are we able to hear them as well? Are these the voices we really need? Is our listening life-space deep enough? Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible?
Can we go outside and listen?
In 1927 Freya Stark, an English writer b
orn in Paris in 1893, who would become known for her astonishing travels through even the most remote parts of the Middle East, paused for a picnic near some Roman ruins outside Damascus. She wrote, “We ate our food with little clouds of Roman sand blown off the hewn stones and thought of the fragility of things.” Near Baghdad she wrote, “. . . in the morning all is peace, and all went out to pasture. The camels, looking as if they felt that their walk is a religious ceremony, went further afield; they are comparatively independent, needing to drink only once in four days; the sheep and goats stayed nearer. And when they had all gone, and melted invisibly into the desert face, the empty luminous peace again descended, lying round us in light and air and silence for the rest of the day.”
Freya Stark’s light and air and silence feel palpable in her paragraphs. Her respect for people unlike herself, her fascination with worlds very different from the European ones she had grown up in—yet fully recognizable in their humanity and hope—heartens me when my own time feels too odd to bear. Her curious voice traveling through the air is more comforting than people currently claiming power, demanding recognition, trying to make others feel as if they don’t belong. Literature gives us a home in bigger time.
But how do we find our ways home? Continually, regularly? With so much vying for our attention, how do we listen better? Reminding ourselves of what we love feels helpful. Walking outside—it’s as quiet as it ever was. The birds still communicate without any help from us. In that deep quietude, doesn’t the air, and the memory, feel more full of voices? If we slow down and intentionally practice listening, calming our own clatter, maybe we hear those voices better. They live on in us. Take a break from multitasking. Although many of us are no longer sitting on rocks in deserts watching camels, sheep, and goats heading out to pasture, we could sit. In a porch swing? On the front steps? In a library or coffee shop? On a park bench? Quiet inspiration may be as necessary as food, water, and shelter. Try giving yourself regular times a day for reading and thinking—even if just for a minute or two. Mindfulness, many agree, is profoundly encouraged by regular practice. A different sort of calm begins feeling like the true atmosphere behind everything else. If you’re an “I read before I go to sleep” sort of person, why not add a little more I-just-got-home-from-school-or-work reading? In the modern world, we deserve to wind down. Or perhaps some morning reading, to launch yourself ? How long does it take to read a poem? Slowing to a more gracious pacing—trying not to hurry or feel overwhelmed—inch by inch—one thought at a time—can be a deeply helpful mantra. It’s a gift we give our own minds.
The melancholy, brilliant singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt died suddenly on New Year’s Day 1997. His many fans were stunned and saddened. That was the first day our son showed me I could “enter the world wide web” to read obituaries and stories about Townes rising suddenly from all over the world—Nashville, London, Berlin. Incredible! How had this happened? Everything was now—available? The searching process felt exotic, haunting, and comforting—fans around the world, grieving for Townes together. His song lines kept rising in my mind for months afterward. “If I needed you, would you come to me?”
I think they all would. All the voices we ever loved or respected in our lives would come. And they would try to help us.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
San Antonio, Texas
MESSAGES
Broken pencil
Broken pen
Maybe today
I’ll write my best poem
To Manage
She writes to me—
I can’t sleep because I’m seventeen
Sometimes I lie awake thinking
I didn’t even clean my room yet
And soon I will be twenty-five
And a failure
And when I am fifty—oh!
I write her back
Slowlyslow
Clean one drawer
Arrange words on a page
Let them find one another
Find you
Trust they might know something
You aren’t livingthe whole thing
At once
That’s what a minutesaid to an hour
Without meyou are nothing
Aurora Borealis
(Fairbanks, Alaska)
The light was speaking to me
stretching out its long gleaming fingers
pointing down
maybe it could hear my shout
shimmering green parentheses
put me in my place
my place was low
every earthbound element
Alaska Gas
Sam’s Sourdough Café
lifting into radiance
snow felt less cold
tiny human leaping
under green swoops
rippled fringes
staggering swish
middle of night
by myself
not by myself
came so close
I almost felt
more than I had
been waiting for
what possible tellings
purplepurplepurple
You sawnothing
knewnothing
beforenow
Nowwhat
doyouknow?
Propriety
How dare they they they
say say say
anything we can or cannot do with our own
red and blue
We are voting for ourselves
unbound by convention
your convention
I refuse to go to the convention
too many people
we will kiss in the hotel hallway
if we please
you and me
New York City on the last day of an old year
in future anytime
EXIT door to hotel stairway appears
feel a sizzle
swizzle stick of memory spinning me
through so much dullness
red and blue
Big Bend National Park
Says No to All Walls
Big Bend has been here, been here.
Shouldn’t it have a say?
Call the mountains a wall if you must,
(the river has never been a wall),
leavened air soaking equally into all,
could this be the home
we ache for? Silent light bathing cliff faces,
dunes altering
in darkness, stones speaking low to one another,
border secrets,
notes so rooted you may never be lonely
the same ways again.
Big bend in thinking—why did you dream
you needed so much?
Water, one small pack. Once I lay on my back
on a concrete table
the whole day and read a book.
A whole book and it was long.
The day I continue to feast on.
Stones sifting a gospel of patience and dust,
no one exalted beyond a perfect parched cliff,
no one waiting for anything you do or don’t do.
Santa Elena, South Rim, once a woman here knew
what everything was named for. Hallie Stillwell,
brimming with stories, her hat still snaps in the wind.
You will not find a prime minister in Big Bend,
a president or even a candidate, beyond the lion,
the javelina, the eagle lighting on its nest.
Time’s Low Note
When the giant moon
rises over the river,
the cat stretches,
presses himself to the window,
croons.
He needs to go outside
into dark grass
to feel the mystery
combing his fur.
The wind never says
Call me back,
I’ll be waiting for your call.
All we know about wind’s address is
somewhere else.
A peony has been tryingto get through to you
When’s the last timeyou really looked at one?
Billowing pinkish whitish petalslushly layered
Might be the prime object of the universe
Peoniesin a house
profoundly upliftthe house
never say noto peonies
Some daysreviewing everything
from brain’s balcony
filigree of thinkinga calm comes in
you can’t fix the whole streetchange the city
or the world
but clearing bits of rubbish possible
moving one stone
Bully
One boy in our grade school was considered
a bully—
muttering rude insults under his breath,
tripping girls as they walked to their desks.
He bothered everyone equally, shook his shaggy
blond hair when teachers called his name.
My mom, hearing the tales, decided he was lonely
(no one ever played with him—in those days
bullies weren’t popular)
and committed me to attending
a children’s Christmas party with him
in the basement of a Methodist church.
Somehow she arranged this plan with his mother
as they waited for us by the schoolyard.
Impressive he had a mother who waited—
he seemed like a person who sprang from a forest,
growling.
My parents argued about the Christmas party
every night before it happened.
Daddy said Mom was “sacrificing me to her idealism.”
He kept calling it my “first date.”
I was only interested in what people did
in basements of churches
and what I would wear and would there be cake.
Since we ate no sugar at our house (idealism),
I dreamed of meeting sweets everywhere else.
The night of the party, Bully wore a suit
and striped tie. He didn’t growl.
It was his church, but he didn’t seem to know anyone.
I stood in my puffed pink icing of a ruffled dress
by the cake table and watched him. He skulked around
while the choir sang Christmas songs,
looked embarrassed when Santa appeared.
I talked to him any time he came near.
Would you like some cake? I don’t recall him
Voices in the Air Page 1