Nye – Meet Me In 811

Poem-A-Day April 1: Happy National Poetry Month!

Hello Friends, and Happy National Poetry Month 2024!

In celebration, I will be sending you one poem per day just for the month of April: 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets.

For those of you new to the list: No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! I’m not going to send you some obtuse obscure long ode that’s impossible to understand (hopefully). My selections do skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (and my favorite part of the library to wander around picking random books off the shelves).

This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work. For a more official poem-a-day email list, please visit the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month.

And now for today’s poem: Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian American poet who I have featured many times before over the years but perhaps never as urgently as today. What is your most sensitive cargo?

Thanks,
Ællen

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

■

Poem-A-Day April 2: coffee cake and ripe peaches

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

■

“So Much Happiness” appears in poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s 1995 collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.

Naomi Shihab Nye has been previously featured in these other poem-a-days.

Poem-A-Day April 26: It is I you have been looking for

Kindness

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.

■

Hello Friends,

“Kindness” can be found in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995) by Naomi Shihab Nye — a poet who has been featured several times before, including:

Poem-A-Day April 8, 2017:
“Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem-A-Day April 29, 2016:
“Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem-A-Day April 17, 2015:
“Making a Fist” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Poem-A-Day April 2, 2014:
“Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change” by Naomi Shihab Nye

I won’t say this about every single poem I’ve ever featured, but these four in particular are each very powerful and absolutely worth your time to give a read.

For another take on “you must lose things,” see also Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” — which I maybe didn’t explain that well in this post from 2008 (there’s so much more that could be said about this poem!), but here it is anyway.

Enjoy.
— Ellen

Fourth Circuit

Hello Friends,


Today's poem comes from a somewhat unexpected location: an order from the United States Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit filed yesterday, agreeing to vacate an injunction while Gavin Grimm's case proceeds. Gavin Grimm, as you may recall, is a young transgender man who just needs to be able to use the boys' bathroom at his high school. It must be National Poetry Month, because Senior Judge Davis invokes the work of the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye in the concurring opinion to the court order!
You can read the whole (short! worth a read!) court document as a PDF here; Nye's poem also appears below. Many thanks to Emilie Eagan for sharing this court doc and explaining it to me on Facebook!
Enjoy.

Ellen


Famous
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.
■

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye was also featured for Poem-A-Day April 29, 2016, Poem-A-Day April 17, 2015, and Poem-A-Day April 2, 2014.

So much of any year is flammable

Burning the Old Year

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.

■

Today’s poem is by the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. For another take on “things I didn’t do,” see W.S. Merwin’s “Something I’ve not done.”

Poem-a-Day April 17, 2015: How do you know

Hello Friends,
Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem about “still lying in the backseat behind all my questions” appears in a collection titled Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995). Nye was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 2, 2014.
Enjoy.
Ellen

Making a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

Poem-a-Day April 2: Train Tracks

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change

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.

Hello Friends,

It’s a nearly universal experience to read or hear the same words over again, and have them mean something different to us, isn’t it? How human of us!

Something we didn’t touch directly on with yesterday’s “Vocabulary” poem is how the meaning of even a single word changes over time and in different contexts — context in sentence, in a room, in the mouth of a particular speaker, in the walls of the brain it reverberates in. You could make an argument that a word signifies something slightly different every single time it’s used — as Humpty Dumpty* argues in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass when he says (in a rather scornful tone), “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

Today’s poem, from the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye in her 1995 collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, is in part about how much of a poem’s, a word’s, a sound’s, a train’s meaning — at the very least half — belongs to the listener, the reader, the audience.

You know that saying about the tree falling in the woods, whether it makes a sound or not if nobody hears it? Is it any less mysterious when the tree falls and people do hear the sound — how much the tree determines what the sound it makes sounds like, and how much the people listening determine that sound? And how much something so much bigger.

You think about that tree, or the train whistle, and don’t ever let anyone tell you that you got the meaning of a poem “wrong,” ok? It’s entirely possible for a poem to mean something to you that the poet never intended — you could argue it’s not only possible, but inevitable. But that doesn’t make the meaning you read wrong; it just makes it yours.

For what Edna St. Vincent Millay hears in the train whistle, see “Traveling.” And for another take on what doesn’t change when stars explode, see Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Shampoo.”

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating with my own eclectic selection of 30 poems by 30 poets, and some of what they mean to me. Thank you again for letting me share this month with you.

— Ellen

* This is the same Humpty Dumpty who, when Alice asks him, “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem ‘Jabberwocky’?”, replies, “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.” One of the amusing things about Humpty Dumpty’s character is that when he’s the speaker, he attributes 100% of the control over language’s meaning to the speaker (or writer). But when Humpty Dumpty is the listener, he attributes 100% of the control over language’s meaning to the listener (or reader).