Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye - 1952-

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.

Skin remembers how long the years grow when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel of singleness, feather lost from the tail of a bird, swirling onto a step, swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather. Skin ate, walked, slept by itself, knew how to raise a see-you-later hand. But skin felt it was never seen, never known as a land on the map, nose like a city, hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope. Skin had hope, that's what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road. Love means you breathe in two countries. And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass, deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own. Even now, when skin is not alone, it remembers being alone and thanks something larger that there are travelers, that people go places larger than themselves.

Even at this late date, sometimes I have to look up the word "receive." I received his deep and interested gaze. A bean plant flourishes under the rain of sweet words. Tell what you think—I'm listening. The story ruffled its twenty leaves. * Once my teacher set me on a high stool for laughing. She thought the eyes of my classmates would whittle me to size. But they said otherwise. We'd laugh too if we knew how. I pinned my gaze out the window on a ripe line of sky. That's where I was going.

remains all supple hands and gesture skin of language fusing its finest seam in fluent light with a raised finger dance of lips each sentence complete he speaks to the shadow of leaves strung tissue paper snipped into delicate flags on which side of the conversation did anyone begin? wearing two skins the brilliant question mark of Mexico stands on its head like an answer

Poems

Kindness

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Poems

Kindness

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