Naomi Shihab Nye’s Three Poems

Getting Older

How to love these numbers.
Not to feel them as bricks, stacking heavily toward a tipping point,
but curved dancers, bending and reaching,
leaning forward into memory that holds you everywhere now.
Pillowing consciousness – days soft with remembrances,
tender skeins of voices. I hear my father, What else can I do?
rowing through pain, or my friend, I don’t think I’m going
to get better, spoken simply as her request for
different socks. No one gets older alone. No one disappears
for the first time. We weren’t here for so many years.

Elsewhere

“No matter how far the town, there is another beyond it.”
Malian proverb

We’re calling out to the far town,
hope you’re finding enough food,

hope your bowls are filled with fruit,
hope the night air cups your dwelling gently.

Did we ever think of you enough, far town?
Were we able to imagine your rivers, light lifting your leaves?

Did you sometimes feel the world forgot you?
You were the world as much as we were.

Palestine Vine

Seeds wrapped tenderly in plastic –
one package said White, one Red.

Hand-lettered and mailed by friends
I never met.

They grew instantly.
Strangely confining themselves to one corner

of the red metal container, as if a metaphor.
I swear I planted them all over.

Exquisitely leafy vines popped forth,
glory and green lengthening overnight.

I didn’t notice one had twined around the rungs of the table.
Today, moving the pot, the biggest vine ripped out, broke off.

No! How could I have missed the simple
wrapping of the tendril suggesting happiness

in that exact light?
Its roots remain. A broken stem.

I wasn’t evil, but I wasn’t careful.
This is what happens in the world.

Now, soaking snipped vine in a glass of water, feeling
the hope and weight of 70 years.

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