Authors: Naomi Shihab Nye
Honeybee (3 page)
I have made so many mistakes
you might think I would sit down
Here when it rains
the streets fill up like rivers
A woman swirls away in her Italian car
and the whole city mourns
They say she could sing
till something that might not have happened
had a chance again
You know, that gift we give
one another
How can we help someone else
want to live?
The man who sprays trees
stands beneath his hose
bathing in poison
He says a mask gets in his way
Here the roses stay on the branch
till sun steams their petals
like blackened collars
I miss the evenings
we walked among train tracks
reading messages in the weeds
even the strangest parts of ourselves
growing dear
A child awakens crying for candles
Those little tiny skinny ones he says
meaning incense sticks
He wants to clutch them in his bed
I have slept so many times
you might think I would really be awake
by now
how to do what they do
through the huge dry days
where were they hiding?
one might lose a tune abandon a tradition
fall into a crack but the frogs after the rain
were singing on six notes
outside the bedroom window's
tangle of vines
pleasure poking its throaty resonance
back into my brain
When I was a teenager, my family drove hundreds of miles from Texas to the Grand Canyon, stopping at small Route 66 motels and diners, buying tea and lemonade in tall cups to keep us going. Seems to me we should have been reading Grand Canyon guidebooks in the car, but I think we were reading novels, newspapers, and magazines, and my mom kept doing crossword puzzles, constantly asking us for esoteric three-letter words. At a roadside stop, a wasp stung my brother in the neck. He said it was a bee, but I had seen it, A WASP. His neck swelled. Our parents worried. He had no experience of ecstasy, however, as I once had upon being stung in the neck vein by a WASP myself. By the time we arrived at our destination, I found myself wrapped around a squishy pillow in the backseat with a thunderous headache. My father woke me, told me to get out to look and see, and for a moment I couldn't remember where we were or why. Astonishing grogginess and crumpled clothes. I stumbled toward the edge of the Great View and noticed a man farther down the line with a raccoon on a leash. This woke me up. The raccoon seemed to be looking into the canyon, nose tipped forward. He turned his head side to side and sniffed, sat back on his
haunches thoughtfully, and put his little paws together. I quietly eased in their direction. The man made some comment to the raccoon, like “Have we ever seen anything better, pal?” And the raccoon looked up at him and smiled. Perhaps I was hallucinating from my headache. I motioned to my family to join me at my eavesdropper's perch, but they had moved off toward a better angle between the trees. I could hear my mom's voice exclaiming, “It's so deep! Look how wide!” But I had so many questions I wanted to ask the man, like “How long have you been together, where did you get him, are you tempted to let him return to his own tribe, did he really just smile,” etc. I could only stare into their reverie from a distance. It didn't seem right to break it. Later, driving home, as my family argued over whether they should have ridden down into the canyon on donkeys or not, whether we should have visited more vantage points or taken a guided hike, whether we should have stayed longer, found a motel room,
blah blah
. I realized I had not seen the layers of stone, the grandness of the Grand Canyon, at all. I had only seen the raccoon.
All night they strum
their tuneless tunes
cousins of the crickets I heard
long ago in the corners of my room
I know the stories
to carry them out, not to crush them
and the small cages they are kept in
for good luck
but tonight I understand them
for the first time
after all my flying over water
the long tipped hours, the stretched-out light
they're saying,
Slow down
slow down
We told you this long ago but
you forgot
When I travel abroad, I will invoke
Ted's poems at checkpoints:
yes, barns, yes, memory, gentility,
the quiet little wind among stones.
If they ask, You are American?
I will say, Ted's kind of American.
No, I carry no scissors or matches.
Yes, horizons, dinner tables.
Yes, weather, the honesty of it.
Buttons, chickens. Feel free
to dump my purse. I'll wander
to the window, stare out for days.
Actually, I have never been
to Nebraska, except with Ted,
who hosted me dozens of times,
though we have never met.
His deep assurance comforts me.
He's not big on torture at all.
He could probably sneak into your country
when you weren't looking
and say something really good about it.
Have you noticed those purple blossoms
in a clump beside your wall?
She's mourning her beloved lamb
found gutted and hanging from the rafters
of the high school barn.
How could anyone do such a thing?
Were they jealous of his prize?
He's mourning his son,
number 3000 American dead in Iraq,
but as far as he can feel, the worst one.
She says, “The lamb would have been killed later
after winning more animal shows, but nicely.”
Now here is a place I pause
in wonder.
The father was grieved to see his son's picture
on an antiwar website.
Each morning the brain struggles to stay focused
on ones in front of it, ones with names,
but some rebellious streak
keeps sweeping the fields for those we won't hear
about,
ragged & bloodied & hurriedly buried
pressed & jumbled & missed by someone else
we also won't know.
Look at this boy on the cover
of the magazine, with head in his hands.
What happened? He's called “a kid
whose village was destroyed,” but
I don't think he's a kid anymore.
George W. Bush believes
in a “culture of life.”
This is very interesting to those
who have recently died
because of his decisions.
They discuss it regularly.
What could they have done
differently
to be alive?
If only they had been born
in another country
or lived in a different neighborhood,
the culture might have included them too.
Actually they liked life a lot.
They can't stop thinking about
their teacups and blankets.
The scent of sheep wool
in a warm room.
Click of almond shells
in a bowl.
That simple coming-home feeling
when someone happy to see you
greets you.
Never could they have imagined
being dead and thinking about teacups.
I am looking for a cry that feels big enough
A wind a mountain a grove of cypress trees
A human being saying something true
Not:
I will kill you today
So someone has a better life tomorrow
If we heard the cries so much like our own
The wailing I-am-burned sounds
I-am-nearly-dead-and-gone sounds
Who could keep blasting?
Help Me
Don't Hurt Me
This story has
No good parts in it
How many are desperate for a day of no explosions?
A sentence without someone's blood
At the end of it
Desperate for one wise person
To stand up bigger than rubble
And stop the rubble
What a lonely time we live in
Thomas Jefferson said
I not only write nothing on religion but rarely permit myself to speak on itâ¦. The genuine system of Jesus and the artificial structures they have erected to make them the instruments of wealth, power and preeminence to themselvesâ¦
I am looking for the human who admits his flaws
Who shocks the adversary
By being kinder not stronger
What would that be like?
We don't even know
Only the innocent shopkeeper led away in chains
The child drawing a dove
The mother bathing burned skin with a feathery cloth
Only they deserve the podium
A grace note and someone to sing it
“I'll be nicer to you than you are to me”
Everything we worked for
Every ethical tradition
Every bridge
More time to ease things out than to break them
Dipping into
Modern Eloquence
Volumes One Through Nine
Published 1900
I kept thinking how far
How far
We are
From there
God said.
You made it up
then put it in God's pocket.
God may have thrown it out already.
We want our nature to have a face.
An eye we can look into,
not like oursâclearer. Strong body
moving swiftly over land, belonging to no one.
Nonpartisan egret,
beyond everything that burdens us,
unexpected, unpredictable,
sheer motionâflash of whiteâ
creatures with a silence
wider than our own.
There are days we wake and need an egret.
Outside Johannesburg, the driver named Samuel and I drove slowly between vast meadows of zebras and small clumps of distant beige lions snoozing on their backs under trees. He said to me, “You want to do my favorite thing? We'll stop where there's no lion. And we'll stare out the window very patiently. All the cars behind us will stop, too. They will want to see what we see. And they will not be able to figure it out. We will point and their eyes will go where we point. If we wait long enough, something good may come into view. It is what I have found from my years of driving through this park. Stop where there is nothing to see and wait. Then you see something better. And trick people in the meantime.”
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“Fine!” I said. What a guy!
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We stopped where there was nothing but a thirsty clump of grayish bushes and a puddle. And the car filled with Japanese travelers behind us stopped, too. And we pointed and peered. We did not open the windows as it is very important in lion parks not to open the windows. Everyone had mentioned the father who
jumped out to take one quick picture the year before and was gobbled down in front of his kids. We pointed and the people behind us stared and stared. They looked curious and frustrated. A few clouds floated by. And then, under the wide South African sky, beside the scraggly bush, just as Samuel had predicted, a white lion stepped forth daintily from a shadowy hiding place, stepped right into the road beside us, ignoring us as if we were not there, and began drinking from the puddle in the road with a long lion tongue. We could see the ripples of muscle under her skin. We could count the toes on her feet.
Days that felt like sheet cakes in long silver pans
frosted or not, plenty of cake no matter
who appeared,
a sift of powdered sugar, and the knife
laid casually by. Maybe a sack of French bread
broken in half. I liked the small stacked plates
on the counter, the way you drove around in a box
without going anywhere. We could send
the bears to school and write notes for them
to take home to their mothers, who were camels
and rabbits. Sometimes I looked at a clock.
When you were four, lightning cracked my brain
and I could see all the way till now, this fist of days
before you leave. It took away my sleep,
my confidence,
who were we before you?
Though of course
there had been more of those yearsâ¦.
When Cyrus says, “Just don't breathe down his neck,
okay?”
I am hanging onto the little bun of hours,
wrapping it in the softest napkin,
tucking it into every pocket,
though you don't see it, you are never hungry
now. The locusts thrumming their summer blues
sound old.
If Jesus had died by an axe, would Christians carry axes around?
You always asked the best questions.
This conversation is not finished.
Remember how the stories had many endings,
you laughed when we changed them.
Take your laundry baskets, your first-aid kit,
but don't take my failings, okay? Forget the times
I snapped, or had no patience, okay?
And I will try to remember
when you liked me more than when you didn't.
It is the butter on the bread.