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    Voices in the Air


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      Dedication

      For Connor James Nye and Virginia Duncan

      In memory, Paula Merwin, Paul Rode, Bill Hanson,

      Thomas Lux, James Tolan, Catherine Kasper, Brother Tony Hearn

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Introduction

      SECTION I: MESSAGES

      To Manage

      Aurora Borealis

      Propriety

      Big Bend National Park Says No to All Walls

      Time’s Low Note

      Bully

      Invocation

      Bamboo Mind

      Cross the Sea

      To Babies

      Songbook

      Unsung—on Finding

      Bundle

      Little Lady, Little Nugget Brooms

      Welcome What Comes

      What Happens Next

      Everything Changes the World

      Standing Back

      Three Hundred Goats

      Lost People

      Broken

      Twilight

      SECTION II: VOICES IN THE AIR

      For Aziz

      Sheep by the Sea, a painting by Rosa Bonheur (1865)

      Emily

      Warbler Woods

      Gratitude Pillow

      Life Loves

      Getting Over It

      Conversation with Grace Paley, Flight of the Mind Writing Workshop, Oregon

      Showing Up

      For Caroline M.

      Tomorrow

      After Listening to Paul Durcan, Ireland

      We Will Get Lost in You

      James Tate in Jerusalem

      Train Across Texas

      Longfellow’s Bed

      Walt Whitman’s Revisions

      “Rest and Be Kind, You Don’t Have to Prove Anything”

      Peace Pilgrim’s Pocket

      C. D. Stepped Out

      True Success

      Woven by Air, Texture of Air

      Tell Us All the Gossip You Know

      Every Day

      One State

      My Name Is . . .

      Invitation to the NSA

      Double Peace

      Break the Worry Cocoon

      The Tent

      Please Sit Down

      For the Birds

      Bowing Candles

      Black Car

      SECTION III: MORE WORLDS

      Mountains

      Oh, Say Can You See

      Anti-Inaugural

      I Vote for You

      Belfast

      Summer

      A Lonely Cup of Coffee

      Reading Obituaries on the Day of the Giant Moon

      To Jamyla Bolden of Ferguson, Missouri

      Your Answering Machine, After Your Death

      Ring

      Hummingbird

      Next Time Ask More Questions

      In Transit

      Zen Boy

      Where Do Poets Find Images?

      Cell Phone Tower Disguised as a Tree

      Before I Was a Gazan

      Morning Ablution

      What Do Palestinians Want?

      Arabs in Finland

      Ladders in Repose

      The Gift

      Voodoo Spoons

      Barbershop

      Getaway Car, United States, 2017

      “Little Brother Shot Playing with Pistol”

      Moment of Relief

      Unbelievable Things

      Airport Life

      Texas, Out Driving

      Missing the Boat, Take Two

      All We Will Not Know

      Loving Working

      Stars Over Big Bend

      United

      Reserved for Poets

      Her Father Still Watching

      Small Basket of Happiness

      Biographical Notes

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Books by Naomi Shihab Nye

      Back Ad

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      Introduction

      Poet Galway Kinnell said, “To me, poetry is someone standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

      Someone—Abraham Lincoln?—once remarked that all the voices ever cast out into the air are still floating around in the far ethers—somehow, somewhere—and if we only knew how to listen well enough, we could hear them even now.

      Voices as guides, lines and stanzas as rooms, sometimes a single word the furniture on which to sit . . . each day we could open the door, and enter, and be found. These days I wonder—was life always strange—just strange in different ways? Does speaking some of the strangeness help us survive it, even if we can’t solve or change it?

      Where is my map—where are we, please? Can voices that entered into our thoughts when we were little help us make amends with the strange time we’re in?

      William Stafford, great twentieth-century American poet and teacher, tireless encourager of dialogue and nonviolence, is still speaking in the slant shadows falling across the path. If we only knew how to listen better, he said, even the grasses by the roadsides could help us live our lives. They’re flexible, for one. What might he say about our current moments in history? Would he be surprised by the divisive rhetoric, mysterious backsliding? Or not surprised at all?

      When I see a highway sign, “No Right Turn onto Whirlwind Drive”—Stafford comes to mind. He carried a decisive calm.

      Peter Matthiessen, the only American writer ever to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, is still standing out on his Long Island beach, staring at the sky, asking us, Did you see that? Flying over just now? Did you catch the span of the wings, the rosy tip of the head?

      Might we pause on our way to everywhere we are rushing off to and hear something in the air, old or new, that would make sense?

      Not so long ago we were never checking anything in our hands, scrolling down, pecking with a finger, obsessively tuning in. My entire childhood did not involve a single deletion. These are relatively new acts on earth.

      In those archaic but still vivid days, there might be a meandering walk into trees, an all-day bike ride, a backyard picnic, a gaze into a stream, a plunge into a sunset, a conversation with pines, a dig in the dirt, to find our messages. When we got home, there was nothing to check or catch up on—no one speaking to us in our absence.

      Recently, when I had the honor of visiting Yokohama International School in Japan to conduct poetry workshops, student Juna Hewitt taught me an important word—Yutori—“life-space.” She listed various interpretations for its meaning—arriving early, so you don’t have to rush. Giving yourself room to make a mistake. Starting a diet, but not beating yourself up if you eat a cookie after you started it. Giving yourself the possibility of succeeding. (Several boys in another class defined the word as when the cord for your phone is long enough to reach the wall socket.) Juna said she felt that reading and writing poetry gives us more yutori—a place to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.

      I love this. It was the best word I learned all year.

      Not that sense of being nibbled up—as if message minnows surround us at all moments, nipping, nipping at our edges.

      Perhaps we have more voices in the air now—on TV, in our phones and computers and little saved videos—but are we able to hear them as well? Are these the voices we really need? Is our listening life-space deep enough? Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible?

      Can we go outside and listen?

      In 1927 Freya Stark, an English writer b
    orn in Paris in 1893, who would become known for her astonishing travels through even the most remote parts of the Middle East, paused for a picnic near some Roman ruins outside Damascus. She wrote, “We ate our food with little clouds of Roman sand blown off the hewn stones and thought of the fragility of things.” Near Baghdad she wrote, “. . . in the morning all is peace, and all went out to pasture. The camels, looking as if they felt that their walk is a religious ceremony, went further afield; they are comparatively independent, needing to drink only once in four days; the sheep and goats stayed nearer. And when they had all gone, and melted invisibly into the desert face, the empty luminous peace again descended, lying round us in light and air and silence for the rest of the day.”

      Freya Stark’s light and air and silence feel palpable in her paragraphs. Her respect for people unlike herself, her fascination with worlds very different from the European ones she had grown up in—yet fully recognizable in their humanity and hope—heartens me when my own time feels too odd to bear. Her curious voice traveling through the air is more comforting than people currently claiming power, demanding recognition, trying to make others feel as if they don’t belong. Literature gives us a home in bigger time.

      But how do we find our ways home? Continually, regularly? With so much vying for our attention, how do we listen better? Reminding ourselves of what we love feels helpful. Walking outside—it’s as quiet as it ever was. The birds still communicate without any help from us. In that deep quietude, doesn’t the air, and the memory, feel more full of voices? If we slow down and intentionally practice listening, calming our own clatter, maybe we hear those voices better. They live on in us. Take a break from multitasking. Although many of us are no longer sitting on rocks in deserts watching camels, sheep, and goats heading out to pasture, we could sit. In a porch swing? On the front steps? In a library or coffee shop? On a park bench? Quiet inspiration may be as necessary as food, water, and shelter. Try giving yourself regular times a day for reading and thinking—even if just for a minute or two. Mindfulness, many agree, is profoundly encouraged by regular practice. A different sort of calm begins feeling like the true atmosphere behind everything else. If you’re an “I read before I go to sleep” sort of person, why not add a little more I-just-got-home-from-school-or-work reading? In the modern world, we deserve to wind down. Or perhaps some morning reading, to launch yourself ? How long does it take to read a poem? Slowing to a more gracious pacing—trying not to hurry or feel overwhelmed—inch by inch—one thought at a time—can be a deeply helpful mantra. It’s a gift we give our own minds.

      The melancholy, brilliant singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt died suddenly on New Year’s Day 1997. His many fans were stunned and saddened. That was the first day our son showed me I could “enter the world wide web” to read obituaries and stories about Townes rising suddenly from all over the world—Nashville, London, Berlin. Incredible! How had this happened? Everything was now—available? The searching process felt exotic, haunting, and comforting—fans around the world, grieving for Townes together. His song lines kept rising in my mind for months afterward. “If I needed you, would you come to me?”

      I think they all would. All the voices we ever loved or respected in our lives would come. And they would try to help us.

      —Naomi Shihab Nye

      San Antonio, Texas

      MESSAGES

      Broken pencil

      Broken pen

      Maybe today

      I’ll write my best poem

      To Manage

      She writes to me—

      I can’t sleep because I’m seventeen

      Sometimes I lie awake thinking

      I didn’t even clean my room yet

      And soon I will be twenty-five

      And a failure

      And when I am fifty—oh!

      I write her back

      Slowlyslow

      Clean one drawer

      Arrange words on a page

      Let them find one another

      Find you

      Trust they might know something

      You aren’t livingthe whole thing

      At once

      That’s what a minutesaid to an hour

      Without meyou are nothing

      Aurora Borealis

      (Fairbanks, Alaska)

      The light was speaking to me

      stretching out its long gleaming fingers

      pointing down

      maybe it could hear my shout

      shimmering green parentheses

      put me in my place

      my place was low

      every earthbound element

      Alaska Gas

      Sam’s Sourdough Café

      lifting into radiance

      snow felt less cold

      tiny human leaping

      under green swoops

      rippled fringes

      staggering swish

      middle of night

      by myself

      not by myself

      came so close

      I almost felt

      more than I had

      been waiting for

      what possible tellings

      purplepurplepurple

      You sawnothing

      knewnothing

      beforenow

      Nowwhat

      doyouknow?

      Propriety

      How dare they they they

      say say say

      anything we can or cannot do with our own

      red and blue

      We are voting for ourselves

      unbound by convention

      your convention

      I refuse to go to the convention

      too many people

      we will kiss in the hotel hallway

      if we please

      you and me

      New York City on the last day of an old year

      in future anytime

      EXIT door to hotel stairway appears

      feel a sizzle

      swizzle stick of memory spinning me

      through so much dullness

      red and blue

      Big Bend National Park

      Says No to All Walls

      Big Bend has been here, been here.

      Shouldn’t it have a say?

      Call the mountains a wall if you must,

      (the river has never been a wall),

      leavened air soaking equally into all,

      could this be the home

      we ache for? Silent light bathing cliff faces,

      dunes altering

      in darkness, stones speaking low to one another,

      border secrets,

      notes so rooted you may never be lonely

      the same ways again.

      Big bend in thinking—why did you dream

      you needed so much?

      Water, one small pack. Once I lay on my back

      on a concrete table

      the whole day and read a book.

      A whole book and it was long.

      The day I continue to feast on.

      Stones sifting a gospel of patience and dust,

      no one exalted beyond a perfect parched cliff,

      no one waiting for anything you do or don’t do.

      Santa Elena, South Rim, once a woman here knew

      what everything was named for. Hallie Stillwell,

      brimming with stories, her hat still snaps in the wind.

      You will not find a prime minister in Big Bend,

      a president or even a candidate, beyond the lion,

      the javelina, the eagle lighting on its nest.

      Time’s Low Note

      When the giant moon

      rises over the river,

      the cat stretches,

      presses himself to the window,

      croons.

      He needs to go outside

      into dark grass

      to feel the mystery

      combing his fur.

      The wind never says

      Call me back,

      I’ll be waiting for your call.

      All we know about wind’s address isr />
      somewhere else.

      A peony has been tryingto get through to you

      When’s the last timeyou really looked at one?

      Billowing pinkish whitish petalslushly layered

      Might be the prime object of the universe

      Peoniesin a house

      profoundly upliftthe house

      never say noto peonies

      Some daysreviewing everything

      from brain’s balcony

      filigree of thinkinga calm comes in

      you can’t fix the whole streetchange the city

      or the world

      but clearing bits of rubbish possible

      moving one stone

      Bully

      One boy in our grade school was considered

      a bully—

      muttering rude insults under his breath,

      tripping girls as they walked to their desks.

      He bothered everyone equally, shook his shaggy

      blond hair when teachers called his name.

      My mom, hearing the tales, decided he was lonely

      (no one ever played with him—in those days

      bullies weren’t popular)

      and committed me to attending

      a children’s Christmas party with him

      in the basement of a Methodist church.

      Somehow she arranged this plan with his mother

      as they waited for us by the schoolyard.

      Impressive he had a mother who waited—

      he seemed like a person who sprang from a forest,

      growling.

      My parents argued about the Christmas party

      every night before it happened.

      Daddy said Mom was “sacrificing me to her idealism.”

      He kept calling it my “first date.”

      I was only interested in what people did

      in basements of churches

      and what I would wear and would there be cake.

      Since we ate no sugar at our house (idealism),

      I dreamed of meeting sweets everywhere else.

      The night of the party, Bully wore a suit

      and striped tie. He didn’t growl.

      It was his church, but he didn’t seem to know anyone.

      I stood in my puffed pink icing of a ruffled dress

      by the cake table and watched him. He skulked around

      while the choir sang Christmas songs,

      looked embarrassed when Santa appeared.

      I talked to him any time he came near.

      Would you like some cake? I don’t recall him

     

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