Thursday, March 12, 2015

The Small Vases From Hebron, Naomi Shihab Nye

The Small Vases from Hebron

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
Tip their mouths open to the sky.   
Turquoise, amber,
the deep green with fluted handle,   
pitcher the size of two thumbs,   
tiny lip and graceful waist.

Here we place the smallest flower   
which could have lived invisibly   
in loose soil beside the road,   
sprig of succulent rosemary,
bowing mint.

They grow deeper in the center of the table.

Here we entrust the small life,   
thread, fragment, breath.   
And it bends. It waits all day.
As the bread cools and the children   
open their gray copybooks   
to shape the letter that looks like   
a chimney rising out of a house.

And what do the headlines say?

Nothing of the smaller petal
perfectly arranged inside the larger petal
or the way tinted glass filters light.   
Men and boys, praying when they died,
fall out of their skins.
The whole alphabet of living,   
heads and tails of words,
sentences, the way they said,   
"Ya'Allah!" when astonished,   
or "ya'ani" for "I mean"—
a crushed glass under the feet
still shines.         
But the child of Hebron sleeps
with the thud of her brothers falling   
and the long sorrow of the color red.

Naomi Shihab Nye, "The Small Vases from Hebron" from Fuel

No comments:

Post a Comment