Naomi Shihab Nye

What can a yellow glove mean in a world of motorcars and governments? I was small, like everyone. Life was a string of precautions: Don’t kiss the squirrel before you bury him, don’t suck candy, pop balloons, drop watermelons, watch TV. When the new gloves appeared one Christmas, tucked in soft tissue, I heard it trailing me: Don’t lose the yellow gloves. I was small, there was too much to remember. One day, waving at a stream—the ice had cracked, winter chipping down, soon we would sail boats and roll into ditches—I let a glove go. Into the stream, sucked under the street. Since when did streets have mouths? I walked home on a desperate road. Gloves cost money. We didn’t have much. I would tell no one. I would wear the yellow glove that was left and keep the other hand in a pocket. I knew my mother’s eyes had tears they had not cried yet, I didn’t want to be the one to make them flow. It was the prayer I spoke secretly, folding socks, lining up donkeys in windowsills.To be good, a promise made to the roaches who scouted my closet at night.If you don’t get in my bed, I will be good. And they listened. I had a lot to fulfill. The months rolled down like towels out of a machine. I sang and drew and fattened the cat. Don’t scream, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fight—you could hear it anywhere. A pebble could show you how to be smooth, tell the truth. A field could show how to sleep without walls. A stream could remember how to drift and change—next June I was stirring the stream like a soup, telling my brother dinner would be ready if he’d only hurry up with the bread, when I saw it. The yellow glove draped on a twig. A muddy survivor. A quiet flag. Where had it been in the three gone months? I could wash it, fold it in my winter drawer with its sister, no one in that world would ever know. There were miracles on Harvey Street. Children walked home in yellow light. Trees were reborn and gloves traveled far, but returned. A thousand miles later, what can a yellow glove mean in a world of bankbooks and stereos? Part of the difference between floating and going down.

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes, the damp shine of a goat’s new skin. When I was sick they followed me, I woke from the long fever to find them covering my head like cool prayers. My grandmother’s days are made of bread, a round pat-pat and the slow baking. She waits by the oven watching a strange car circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son, lost to America. More often, tourists, who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines. She knows how often mail arrives, how rarely there is a letter. When one comes, she announces it, a miracle, listening to it read again and again in the dim evening light. My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her. Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby. She knows the spaces we travel through, the messages we cannot send—our voices are short and would get lost on the journey. Farewell to the husband’s coat, the ones she has loved and nourished, who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky. They will plant themselves. We will all die. My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death. When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press, when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms, He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name. “Answer, if you hear the words under the words— otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

Humps of shell emerge from dark water. Believers toss hunks of bread, hoping the fat reptilian heads will loom forth from the murk and eat. Meaning:you have been heard.

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change is train tracks. She’s sure of it. The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery by the side, but not the tracks. I’ve watched one for three years, she says, and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow. Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore. The wood was split and some of the ties were gone. Every Tuesday on Morales Street butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens. The widow in the tilted house spices her soup with cinnamon. Ask her what doesn’t change. Stars explode. The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals. The cat who knew me is buried under the bush. The train whistle still wails its ancient sound but when it goes away, shrinking back from the walls of the brain, it takes something different with it every time.

We made it from the ground-up corn in the old back pasture. Pinched a scent of night jasmine billowing off the fence, popped it right in. That frog song wanting nothing but echo? We used that. Stirred it widely. Noticed the clouds while stirring. Called upon our ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes of summer. Dropped in their names. Added a mint leaf now and then to hearten the broth. Added a note of cheer and worry. Orange butterfly between the claps of thunder? Perfect. And once we had it, had smelled and tasted the fragrant syrup, placing the pan on a back burner for keeping, the sorrow lifted in small ways. We boiled down the lies in another pan till they disappeared. We washed that pan.

My brother, in his small white bed, held one end. I tugged the other to signal I was still awake. We could have spoken, could have sung to one another, we were in the same room for five years, but the soft cord with its little frayed ends connected us in the dark, gave comfort even if we had been bickering all day. When he fell asleep first and his end of the cord dropped to the floor, I missed him terribly, though I could hear his even breath and we had such long and separate lives ahead.

is not turning the way you thought it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop, the way a child draws the tail of a pig. What came out of your mouth, a riff of common talk. As a sudden weather shift on a beach, sky looming mountains of cloud in a way you cannot predict or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens, takes its own side. And it is strange. Far more complicated than a few phrases pieced together around a kitchen table on a July morning in Dallas, say, a city you don’t live in, where people might shop forever or throw a thousand stories away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted? Stories wandering out, having their own free lives? Maybe they are planning something bad. A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember is growing into a weird body with many demands. One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock, knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

Tip their mouths open to the sky. Turquoise, amber, the deep green with fluted handle, pitcher the size of two thumbs, tiny lip and graceful waist. Here we place the smallest flower which could have lived invisibly in loose soil beside the road, sprig of succulent rosemary, bowing mint. They grow deeper in the center of the table. Here we entrust the small life, thread, fragment, breath. And it bends. It waits all day. As the bread cools and the children open their gray copybooks to shape the letter that looks like a chimney rising out of a house. And what do the headlines say? Nothing of the smaller petal perfectly arranged inside the larger petal or the way tinted glass filters light. Men and boys, praying when they died, fall out of their skins. The whole alphabet of living, heads and tails of words, sentences, the way they said, “Ya’Allah!” when astonished, or “ya’ani” for “I mean”— a crushed glass under the feet still shines. But the child of Hebron sleeps with the thud of her brothers falling and the long sorrow of the color red.

Music lives inside my legs. It’s coming out when I talk. I’m going to send my valentines to people you don’t even know. Oatmeal cookies make my throat gallop. Grown-ups keep their feet on the ground when they swing. I hate that. Look at those 2 o’s with a smash in the middle— that spells good-bye. Don’t ever say “purpose” again, let’s throw the word out. Don’t talk big to me. I’m carrying my box of faces. If I want to change faces I will. Yesterday faded but tomorrow’s in boldface . When I grow up my old names will live in the house where we live now. I’ll come and visit them. Only one of my eyes is tired. The other eye and my body aren’t. Is it true all metal was liquid first? Does that mean if we bought our car earlier they could have served it in a cup? There’s a stopper in my arm that’s not going to let me grow any bigger. I’ll be like this always, small. And I will be deep water too. Wait. Just wait. How deep is the river? Would it cover the tallest man with his hands in the air? Your head is a souvenir. When you were in New York I could see you in real life walking in my mind. I’ll invite a bee to live in your shoe. What if you found your shoe full of honey? What if the clock said 6:92 instead of 6:30? Would you be scared? My tongue is the car wash for the spoon. Can noodles swim? My toes are dictionaries. Do you need any words? From now on I’ll only drink white milk on January 26. What does minus mean? I never want to minus you. Just think—no one has ever seen inside this peanut before! It is hard being a person. I do and don’t love you— isn't that happiness?

Serum of steam rising from the cup, what comfort to be known personally by Barbara, her perfect pouring hand and starched ascot, known as the two easy eggs and the single pancake, without saying. What pleasure for an immigrant— anything without saying. My uncle slid into his booth. I cannot tell you—how I love this place. He drained the water glass, noisily clinking his ice. My uncle hailed from an iceless region. He had definite ideas about water drinking. I cannot tell you—all the time. But then he’d try. My uncle wore a white shirt every day of his life. He raised his hand against the roaring ocean and the television full of lies. He shook his head back and forth from one country to the other and his ticket grew longer. Immigrants had double and nothing all at once. Immigrants drove the taxis, sold the beer and Cokes. When he found one note that rang true, he sang it over and over inside. Coffee, honey. His eyes roamed the couples at other booths, their loose banter and casual clothes. But he never became them. Uncle who finally left in a bravado moment after 23 years,to live in the old country forever, to stay and never come back,