Poem Set #2

The Words Under the Words

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem

My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,   

the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.   

When I was sick they followed me,

I woke from the long fever to find them   

covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother’s days are made of bread,   

a round pat-pat and the slow baking.

She waits by the oven watching a strange car   

circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,   

lost to America. More often, tourists,   

who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.   

She knows how often mail arrives,

how rarely there is a letter.

When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,   

listening to it read again and again

in the dim evening light.

My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her.

Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.   

She knows the spaces we travel through,   

the messages we cannot send—our voices are short   

and would get lost on the journey.

Farewell to the husband’s coat,

the ones she has loved and nourished,

who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.   

They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.   

When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,   

when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,   

He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.

“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—

otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,   

difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

Naomi Shihab Nye, “The Words Under the Words” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995).

Two Countries

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.

Blood

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE



“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”   

my father would say. And he’d prove it,

cupping the buzzer instantly

while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.

True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.   

I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,

wanted to see the Arab.

I said we didn’t have one.

After that, my father told me who he was,   

“Shihab”—“shooting star”—

a good name, borrowed from the sky.

Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”   

He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.

A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.   

Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root   

is too big for us. What flag can we wave?

I wave the flag of stone and seed,

table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news.   

It is too much for him,

neither of his two languages can reach it.

I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,   

to plead with the air:

Who calls anyone civilized?





Where can the crying heart graze?

What does a true Arab do now?


Naomi Shihab Nye, “Blood” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems