Honeybee

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  versus democracy, I’ll bet you’d pick…

  No, no, Sami, that’s not true

  what you said at the rally,

  that our country hates you,

  we really support your move

  toward freedom,

  that’s why you no longer have

  a house or a family or a village…

  Dear Hassan, If only you could see

  the bigger picture…

  Dear Mary, I’m surprised you have

  what we would call a Christian name

  since you yourself…

  Dear Ribhia, Sorry about that heart attack,

  I know it must have been rough to live

  your entire life under occupation,

  we’re sending a few more bombs over now

  to fortify your oppressors,

  but someday we hope for peace in the region,

  sorry you won’t be there to see it…

  Dear Suheir, Surely a voice is made to be raised,

  don’t you see we are speaking

  for your own interests…

  Dear Sharif, Violence is wrong

  unless we are using it,

  why doesn’t that make sense…

  Dear Nadia, I did not know about

  your special drawer, you know I like

  to keep a few things too that have meaning to me…

  Dear Ramzi, You really need to stop crying now

  and go on about your business…

  Dear Daddo, I know 5 kids

  must feel like a lot to lose in one swoop

  but we can’t stop our efforts…

  Dear Fatima, Of course I have feelings

  for your own people, my college roommate

  was from Lebanon…

  Dear Mahmoud, I wish I had time

  to answer your letter but you must understand

  the mail has really been stacking up…

  Broken

  I broke my favorite glass today,

  Habana Cuba it said in blue,

  with a strange little etching of a ruin,

  perfect for summer mint and lime.

  Knocked its block off, right in the sink.

  But it’s a time of sorrow anyway,

  one glass is nothing.

  So many glasses

  are smashed in the dirt.

  Coffee cups, crushed to rubble.

  Proud bridges, buildings, bookshelves,

  we sign all the petitions

  but bombs continue to blow.

  A president who doesn’t do everything he can

  to stop war

  should break his own plates and see how it feels.

  Should walk and cower and weep.

  Should be wearing someone’s borrowed clothes

  and kissing his brother’s broken face

  by a pool where the dead are bathed.

  A president who prefers wars to talking

  should be bowing down in a schoolroom

  where words on a wrecked wall whisper one last time,

  Say it. Say it with language—noun, verb, adverb—

  the ways words come together to make a line

  someone might understand.

  O Havana, I’m hoping to visit you soon,

  hoping for your better days.

  I want to see your buildings

  before someone smashes them.

  O Lebanon, I never got there yet,

  and now we will never get

  to what you used to be.

  And to ancient Iraq, multitudes of people

  and blocks we will never see—

  no apology big enough.

  It is hard to drink lemonade

  without weeping into the glass,

  the generic glass that reminds me of

  nowhere we dreamed of going.

  The Cost

  How deeply agreeable,

  the word read appearing in

  the word thread.

  A church marquee in Wisconsin

  asked, WHAT DOES IT TAKE

  TO MAKE PEACE?

  A lot, apparently.

  We could start with all the elementary

  school librarians and counselors

  fired here last night

  for “lack of funds.”

  Peacemakers, every one of them,

  I’d place my money on it.

  So many lives threading out into

  the wilderness of adulthood

  fortified by books and good advice.

  Oh students, we will teach you

  everything you need to know

  then place a gun in your hands?

  Makes sense, doesn’t it?

  No sense seems common anymore.

  Friendly Postal Clerk, Saturday Morning

  So what do poets do on

  weekends

  huh?

  I guess nuthin’ much

  right?

  I guess every day

  is a weekend

  to you?

  While You Were Out

  A crow

  with a yellow Post-it note

  stuck to its beak

  paused on the feeder

  beyond the window

  looked around twice

  nodded its head

  then flew away.

  Big Day

  at the office.

  Driving to Abilene in the Pouring Rain

  From San Antonio to Abilene I never turned my windshield wipers off. That’s four straight hours. The hills were flush with rain. Junction reminded me of a cinnamon roll three months ago. I turned my Bob Dylan CD up loud so I could hear it over the thunder. Bob kept me steady on the flooded two-lane. I passed Menard with its historic ditch. Big day for a ditch. In Eden I bought a juice called Nirvana and took a wrong turn. The girl said, We have only one stoplight.…but I missed it. Bob was not quite there yet but he was getting closer and closer. It was raining too hard to see. Then a massive silver cross in a field at Ballinger scared me, the way oversized things did when I was a kid. Why do people do that? Make things too big? This did not seem like the route I used to take. I pulled off to read the map. Where was Coleman? Where was that old windmill with only two blades? I used to sit around with kids in the Buffalo Gap cemetery and let them make grave rubbings. Now there were ugly subdivisions, big mistakes slapped up outside towns. Then I passed a restaurant where we once had the worst meal in the state of Texas and felt right at home again.

  Cinnamon Twist

  We did not mean to hurt my mother’s feelings when we filled out the application form in her name in response to the Help Wanted sign in the window of the bakery. She was startled to be called for an interview regarding a job to which she had not applied. We were trying to ease her loneliness. She & my father had recently moved to a different city, leaving both their children behind. She had not yet found many new friends or activities. My father & I were taking a walk together in the unfamiliar neighborhood, discussing her melancholia, when we saw the sign. It was not the first mistake in anyone’s life. She could walk to work. Passing the groomed suburban houses in their impeccable isolation & the ragtag apartments & the cleaners & the video store & the grocery where the carts bunched up around the poles in the parking lot by early afternoon…wearing a hat against the serious Texas sun, perhaps a straw hat she might wear to work in a garden…carrying a purse with a wallet, a coupon for Handi-Wrap & one for cat food…what did you do in a bakery besides measure, mix, bake, arrange, slide new trays onto shelves, dust crumbs, talk to ladies wearing nice linen jackets or tank tops, take orders, fill sacks, make change? It sounded comforting. Sugar shakers and honey bears. Cake doughnuts or French? Glazed or powdered? We did not know about the secret album under the cash register that people would ask for in a glinting manner, or that our own mother would be asked to lift it forth & open it before their eyes, cakes shaped like breasts, single or double, with luscious nipples, the giant pink or chocolate penis cakes, the Sock It To Me! cakes, innuendos of plump
cleavage sculpted into lemony icing. That she would have to ask, This way or that? about things she had never discussed either with her children or husband or her own parents—sparkles, ripples, & curves. Where the candles might go, for example, in such an instance. Who the cake should be delivered to, exactly, & what was the occasion, what words should be inscribed? It is easy to imagine her never smiling through any of these transactions, keeping a stern face, taking the money as you would touch something that had fallen into a toilet. She blamed us. Sure she did. As if we had known. The thought of these things being baked into cake had never occurred to me on this earth, even in my oddest fantasy, nor to my father; the two innocents, as we depicted ourselves during her rages. To us, the only thing to worry about in a bakery was what kind of shortening they used in the cookies or how long the cupcakes had been in the case. We had tricked her into bondage to a bakery of shame. So quit! we begged her. Quit! But her German Lutheran upbringing which said something about never running from a task once your name was on the time chart was something we could not reckon with. I think a few seasons passed. People in leopard-printed coats bought cakes for bachelor parties. Secretaries selected long cakes for wild office bashes. A mother bought a cake for her son who was turning 18. My mother glared fiercely, slamming her money down. My father & I lived in fear. Of course large numbers of people who knew nothing about the secret cakes dropped in to pick up regular sacks of cookies on their way home from the drugstore or glossy red cupcakes for a great-nephew on St. Valentine’s Day—these were the people my mother lived for, the pure hearts, clean of ulterior intent. Eventually she eased back into Montessori teaching, her preferred & regular vocation. But I think she was marked by the album under the counter. It left a shadow in her spirit, a spooky truth—your most familiar people could open the door to the underworld without even knowing it & not be able to rescue you, once you toppled through.

  Sunday

  Even though my parents had seen the French movie starring Omar Sharif in a theater and called it “very depressing,” I checked it out of the library. But something was wrong with it. We pressed the English text button, the subtitles did not appear. French people were breaking piggybanks, moving in and out of neighborhood grocery stores. A teenage boy stared wistfully through the second-story window of his bedroom. We had no dialogue to connect the scenes. Where are the words? we kept saying. This is kooky! Rewind it! Find the words! But they wouldn’t come up. We actually thought the movie might be too large for our screen—were the words appearing in the air below the TV set? We shrank the picture and still they didn’t appear. Suddenly a sentence flashed and we sat forward in our seats—but the sentence, apparently spoken by Omar Sharif’s elderly storekeeper character, was “I am not an Arab.” That was it. No other text followed, even when the boy in the movie responded rapidly. I remembered how Egyptians often make a distinction between themselves and other Middle Easterners. But when the same line appeared five minutes later, spoken by another character, this time a blond woman in a tight dress, “I am not an Arab”—it seemed confusing. The same line occurred a third time, popping out of someone else’s mouth—an incidental old lady character who had just walked into the grocery—“I am not an Arab”—followed, most mysteriously, by “never on a Sunday.” And that was it. No other words appeared, though everyone kept talking at a rapid French pace. We wondered if the maker-of-subtitles had fallen asleep on the job, and we turned off the movie shortly thereafter. The world is too frustrating already to watch movies without any sound. And all the Arabs I know are Arabs on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc., as well as on Sunday. Despite what the world might think, they actually like it.

  We Are Not Nothing

  Two beads on strings

  pop from a round head

  on a wooden stick.

  This little drum

  with subtle brown skin

  never forgets

  his simple music.

  If you roll the stick side to side

  between your palms,

  the beads hit the face

  and the back of the face,

  snap snap,

  with a rhythm to it,

  something old and definite,

  something under the song

  in a tiny Palestinian drum

  shaking his humble head.

  Our Best Selves

  Tiny folded red message:

  A MILLION POUNDS OF LOVE IN THIS NOTE!

  For twelve years it travels in my wallet.

  In my old linen shirt, the label reads:

  “All my cells are perfect spirit

  doing their perfect work.”

  What an optimistic shirt.

  But the message from my cousin

  shows full-color photos

  of Fallujah children sprawled

  dead in a dusty street, American soldiers

  leaning jauntily on tanks.

  “What do we do with this sadness?”

  the message pleads.

  “How do we celebrate the Eid?”

  I feel like my friend who once said,

  “How can I ever be happy

  when my brother has schizophrenia?”

  O where is my mama who said,

  Use words when she sent us off to school?

  If someone gives you trouble,

  remember your best self.

  Where is my Arab father

  who came to a new land

  believing its language?

  Where is the note of justice

  tucked into history?

  A billion pounds of wisdom

  in this lost note.

  Where is the faded tag reading

  separation of church and state,

  the country ’tis of US

  momentarily broken in two

  and the earnest son

  gripping the little pencil?

  The Dirtiest 4-Letter Word

  is “self” says the sign on a church

  and I almost run off the road.

  What about Kill? Hate? Rape?

  Even “whip” sounds worse than “self”

  or might we try “lies”? Now I remember why

  Sunday School gave me a stomach ache.

  RSVP

  I’m sorry.

  I cannot come.

  I cannot be there.

  I am sure the party will be

  just as good without me.

  A previous engagement

  with a Mottled Houdan

  makes my presence impossible.

  We must conduct a dance in the dust.

  There’s a slip of silence to be polished.

  Please convey my regards.

  New regard for the word putter,

  among others.

  I so much thank you

  for thinking of me.

  Boathouse

  (For E. B. White)

  Isn’t it only a moment ago

  you left?

  Water rippling

  giant harbor stones

  thunder approaching

  At your writing table we sit

  on your birthday

  21 years after your departure

  staring out your window

  no words all words

  you were trying to say

  “you loved the world”

  from this little shingled house

  blue door climbing vines

  by the quiet dependable water

  lobsters hand painted on table & chair

  soft scratchings pencil on pad

  typewriter tick tick

  so beautiful & confusing where we are

  still trying to say it

  The Problem of Muchness

  One thing does not lead to another,

  it leads to everything.

  Days as pennies, grasses, tidal swells of speckled

  distraction,

  and how could you waste time, really?

  What did it mean to waste time?

  If you stared
at a soft beam of light crossing a floor,

  was that looking wasted?

  The concept of “catching up”

  felt troublesome, too.

  Catch up with what?

  The yellow Post-it notes strewn across the desk?

  I tried never to rush, never to think of more than

  one thing

  at any given moment.

  Ha.

  While brushing hair I remembered unsent letters.

  While feeding the cat I saw weeds wagging their

  tongues.

  How Do I Know When a Poem Is Finished?

  When you quietly close

  the door to a room

  the room is not finished.

  It is resting. Temporarily.

  Glad to be without you

  for a while.

  Now it has time to gather

  its balls of gray dust,

  to pitch them from corner to corner.

  Now it seeps back into itself,

  unruffled and proud.

  Outlines grow firmer.

  When you return,

  you might move the stack of books,

  freshen the water for the roses.

  I think you could keep doing this