Naomi Shihab Nye

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. —

Spun silk of mercy, long-limbed afternoon, sun urging purple blossoms from baked stems. What better blessing than to move without hurry under trees? Lugging a bucket to the rose that became a twining house by now, roof and walls of vine— you could live inside this rose. Pouring a slow stream around the ancient pineapple crowned with spiky fruit, I thought we would feel old by the year 2000. Walt Disney thought cars would fly. What a drama to keep thinking the last summer the last birthday

“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.

On an island the soft hue of memory, moss green, kerosene yellow, drifting, mingling in the Caribbean Sea, a six-year-old named Alfred learns all the words to all the songs on his grandparents’ jukebox, and sings them. To learn the words is not so hard. Many barmaids and teenagers have done as well. But to sing as Alfred sings— how can a giant whale live in the small pool of his chest? How can there be breakers this high, notes crashing at the beach of the throat, and a reef of coral so enormous only the fishes know its size? The grandparents watch. They can’t sing. They don’t know who this voice is, trapped in their grandson’s body. The boy whose parents sent him back to the island to chatter mango-talk and scrap with chickens— three years ago he didn’t know the word “sad”! Now he strings a hundred passionate sentences on a single line. He bangs his fist so they will raise the volume. What will they do together in their old age? It is hard enough keeping yourself alive. And this wild boy, loving nothing but music— he’ll sing all night, hugging the jukebox. When a record pauses, that live second before dropping down, Alfred hugs tighter, arms stretched wide, head pressed on the luminous belly. “Now!” he yells. A half-smile when the needle breathes again. They’ve tried putting him to bed, but he sings in bed. Even in Spanish—and he doesn’t speak Spanish! Sings and screams, wants to go back to the jukebox. O mama I was born with a trumpet in my throat spent all these years tryin’ to cough it up …

Some nights the rat with pointed teeth makes his long way back to the bowl of peaches. He stands on the dining room table sinking his tooth drinking the pulp of each fruity turned-up face knowing you will read this message and scream. It is his only text, to take and take in darkness, to be gone before you awaken and your giant feet start creaking the floor. Where is the mother of the rat? The father, the shredded nest, which breath were we taking when the rat was born, when he lifted his shivering snout to rafter and rivet and stone? I gave him the names of the devil, seared and screeching names, I would not enter those rooms without a stick to guide me, I leaned on the light, shuddering, and the moist earth under the house, the trailing tails of clouds, said he was in the closet, the drawer of candles, his nose was a wick. How would we live together with our sad shoes and hideouts, our lock on the door and his delicate fingered paws that could clutch and grip, his blank slate of fur and the pillow where we press our faces? The bed that was a boat is sinking. And the shores of morning loom up lined with little shadows, things we never wanted to be, or meet, and all the rats are waving hello.

Because the eye has a short shadow or it is hard to see over heads in the crowd? If everyone else seems smarter but you need your own secret? If mystery was never your friend? If one way could satisfy the infinite heart of the heavens? If you liked the king on his golden throne more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons? If you wanted to be sure his guards would admit you to the party? The boy with the broken pencil scrapes his little knife against the lead turning and turning it as a point emerges from the wood again If he would believe his life is like that he would not follow his father into war

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.

There was the method of kneeling, a fine method, if you lived in a country where stones were smooth. The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards, hidden corners where knee fit rock. Their prayers were weathered rib bones, small calcium words uttered in sequence, as if this shedding of syllables could somehow fuse them to the sky. There were the men who had been shepherds so long they walked like sheep. Under the olive trees, they raised their arms— Hear us! We have pain on earth! We have so much pain there is no place to store it! But the olives bobbed peacefully in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme. At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese, and were happy in spite of the pain, because there was also happiness. Some prized the pilgrimage, wrapping themselves in new white linen to ride buses across miles of vacant sand. When they arrived at Mecca they would circle the holy places, on foot, many times, they would bend to kiss the earth and return, their lean faces housing mystery. While for certain cousins and grandmothers the pilgrimage occurred daily, lugging water from the spring or balancing the baskets of grapes. These were the ones present at births, humming quietly to perspiring mothers. The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses, forgetting how easily children soil clothes. There were those who didn’t care about praying. The young ones. The ones who had been to America. They told the old ones, you are wasting your time. Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones. They prayed for Allah to mend their brains, for the twig, the round moon, to speak suddenly in a commanding tone. And occasionally there would be one who did none of this, the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool, who beat everyone at dominoes, insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats, and was famous for his laugh.

Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone. Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the smallest numbers. Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves, only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies.

Every few minutes, he wants to march the trail of flattened rye grass back to the house of muttering hens. He too could make a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it to his ear while the other children laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him, so little yet, too forgetful in games, ready to cry if the ball brushed him, riveted to the secret of birds caught up inside his fist, not ready to give it over to the refrigerator or the rest of the day.