Honeybee

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  forever. But the blue chair looks best

  with the red pillow. So you might as well

  leave it that way.

  Excuse Me But

  Did you lose a black fleece vest with green gloves in the pocket? I found it on the ground at Asilomar, California, a few years ago. Now I cannot remember if there was one green glove nestled in each zippered pocket or if the gloves were rolled up together. They seemed very new and well-chosen for the chilly evening wind by the ocean. I felt bad for whoever had lost such a durable combo, and held the items out in my hands like an offering to the young Asian man at the lobby check-in desk in the beautiful building designed by Julia Morgan. He said, “No one will claim them. Everyone from the last conference is gone. See? I have all the room keys right here. You are the only person in that building right now and no one else is expected till tomorrow. Keep those things.” “But someone may claim them later,” I said. “Here’s my phone number back home in Texas. If anyone calls you, please call me and I’ll mail them home.” “They won’t,” he said. “No one will call. Trust me. No one. Why would they call me?” “But just in case,” I pressed. “Someone will be very sad when they discover their loss. These are lovely useful things. Tape my number to your desk please. Don’t let it get away.”

  He stared at me as if I were a zombie from zombieland interrupting his day. “I will,” he said slowly. “Just in case.”

  Well, he never phoned and I started wearing the vest right away.

  By now I have worn it in probably thirty states and five countries. We have bonded. The zippered pockets are incredibly useful on planes. Gloves still feel fairly new. I mean, global warming and all—even in Canada people barely wear gloves. But if they’re yours, and you read this, I’ll still send it all back to you.

  Bears

  At breakfast we’re discussing

  what to do if you meet a bear

  Sometimes you run

  Sometimes you stand still and shout

  so the bear will think you’re bigger

  Bears are great from a distance

  ambling with cubs on a mountain trail

  frolicking beside the train track

  if you’re safely inside the train

  Grandpa bear rising up

  from a distant cave

  stretching his limbs

  after months of hibernation

  We saw one in Maine

  while trying to see

  a moose

  Pacify

  Teenage boy lying asleep on a Toronto sidewalk

  over a warm air grate

  at 7 in the morning

  people with briefcases & fresh shirts

  stepping neatly around

  his ragged pouch & filthy pants

  baby’s pacifier tucked in his mouth Wow

  Is it a Canadian thing?

  So strange All day I think

  how most boys that age

  wouldn’t be caught dead…

  What brought him to a chilly sidewalk

  for the night?

  Where is his mother?

  How many times all mothers fail

  to be the ones our sons might need

  please someone

  protect him on behalf of

  the family

  (for everyone’s sake)

  we need to be

  To One Now Grown

  If we could start over, I would let you get dirtier.

  Place your face in the food, it’s okay.

  In trade for great metaphors,

  the ones you used to spout every minute,

  I’d extend your bedtime,

  be more patient with tantrums,

  never answer urgency with urgency,

  try to stay serene.

  In one scene you are screaming

  And I stop the car.

  What do we do next?

  I can’t remember.

  It’s buried in the drawer of small socks.

  Give me the box of time.

  Let’s make it bigger.

  It’s all yours.

  Watch Your Language

  Pleasant words are a honeycomb,

  sweet to the soul

  and healing to the bones.

  —Proverbs 16:24

  A militant is not a man

  who orders stealth bombers

  to devastate a neighborhood.

  He has a lot of money

  so he is not a militant.

  A militant is a man

  whose 14-year-old son

  was killed last week.

  He is now out of his mind.

  He could do something dangerous

  and he has no money at all.

  Watch him.

  Cat Plate

  That’s what we used to do in our house,

  says Lydia, when we were mad at our dad—

  we served him on the cat plate.

  He didn’t know, since he never fed the cat.

  It made us laugh secretly in the kitchen—

  the plate had a crack so maybe

  some cat saliva had stuck in there.

  It gave us a little buzz.

  Once when he was being really mean,

  he grabbed what he thought was tuna in

  a glass container

  but it was cat food. Our mother, washing dishes,

  froze with her mouth wide open when she realized—

  I shook my head, finger on my lips.

  From the living room he said, This tuna

  has taken on a new taste.

  No one told him.

  We just did our homework silently

  at the kitchen table

  and grinned when we caught each other’s eye.

  There were all kinds of ways

  we felt better about our lives back then

  and sometimes they surprised us.

  Click

  The birthday party day unexpectedly holds

  a funeral, too, Dutch chocolate torte layered

  with His Eye Is on the Sparrow.

  Buddhist wedding ceremony, same day

  H and P decide to split.

  Comfort’s General Store burns down

  right before our neighbor’s house is robbed.

  One million acres of the Texas Panhandle

  flaming, ten thousand animals

  scorched. Three people told me

  poetry saved their lives, on the same day

  they told me this.

  Hibernate

  My father’s friend Farouk

  has a dream:

  God resigned.

  And all the people took better care of one another

  and got together then

  because, well, they had to.

  Things grew really smooth.

  There was no one to blame or impress.

  Professor Brother Miguel Angel

  is healing “mexican style”

  every day of the week for free.

  He is healing “different from others.”

  He will “run away bad neighbors”

  if you ask him to. Note: he stuck his

  promotional poster on your neighbor’s house

  as well as your own.

  He will “bring back boyfriends”

  and “give names of persons.”

  Call for appointment

  night or day. Good luck for Bingo,

  too. Bingo is capitalized,

  mexican is not. I want

  brown magic this year.

  Brown dusty desert magic.

  I want peace even if it involves

  a lot of weeping and apology.

  Can you help me? Keep

  your Bingo joy, I need real

  people lighting sage sticks,

  being honest. Say disaster.

  Thank you.

  Spring feels different this year.

  It’s a bandage.

  Mountain laurel…jasmine…

  The wound keeps oozing, though.

 
I keep thinking how the man who said

  100 Arabs don’t equal 1 American

  was wearing a white shirt

  and had seemed perfectly normal

  up till then.

  Favorite questions from the FBI:

  In all your travels, have you ever met

  anyone who used an assumed name?

  Uh, it is possible Abdul Faisal Shamsuzzaman

  was really Jack Smith, but how would I know?

  In all your travels, did you ever meet anyone

  who wanted to overthrow their country?

  Hmmmm, would they have announced it?

  Yes. Me. Now.

  The turtles who live with us emerge from hibernation

  on the first day of Official Spring.

  How do they know?

  And where were they for the whole iffy winter?

  In which bed of leaves did they bury

  themselves?

  On the first Official Day,

  they climbed heavily back into their old red tub

  lifting reptilian heads above water,

  blinking slowly…

  we were so ready to feed them.

  It’s awkward to be with people sometimes,

  making shapes in the air

  that feel like sense—

  I’d rather talk to J. Frank Dobie

  who died years ago.

  Lucille remembers him sitting

  in a white linen suit

  on her grandfather’s South Texas porch,

  stories spinning like spiders

  along the wooden beams…

  Homeland Security wanted to know

  what those mysterious silver objects were,

  entering my cousin’s home—

  trays of tabouleh

  covered with aluminum foil.

  Logic hibernates.

  Truth, too.

  It has been known to stay gone

  for years.

  My President Went

  quail hunting

  to celebrate the advent

  of a new year.

  He didn’t kill many birds

  only five,

  but called it “lots of fun.”

  Each bird had lungs

  and fancy feathers

  and elegant strong feet.

  People who study quail

  describe their

  “small family groups,”

  how some species prefer

  to crouch and hide in tall grass

  while others

  “fly in the face of danger.”

  There are many things

  my president might have done

  after months of killing and sorrow

  but he chose to take a gun

  into the fields.

  Note: I wrote this poem before my vice-president shot his friend in the face while quail hunting in south Texas. The above poem also happened in Texas. Sometimes when young writers ask what triggers poems, I could just hold up a daily newspaper, which still costs fifty cents except on Sundays in many cities.

  Texas Swing Low

  JESUS IS THE KING OF CUERO

  trumpets a billboard on Highway 87 South.

  I wonder, is it enough,

  would He be glad to hear this?

  And what about Smiley and Pandora,

  is He just a prince there, or perhaps

  a backup band? And Stockdale’s signs

  seem devoted to the Internet.

  In brisk December, Victoria and Goliad

  pray barbeque will come around again

  on the Sunday grill.

  New holiday trend in coastal bend:

  bare wooden crosses in bare front yards.

  But isn’t that Easter?

  Jesus doesn’t get a lot of say.

  Jesus is the king of the toy box.

  Jesus misses the old days.

  A lone ostrich stands

  in a windswept overgrown brown field

  behind the faded EXOTICS sign

  tacked to her fence.

  INFO ON HUNTING it says.

  Then a telephone number she can’t dial

  from this life or the next.

  From an Island

  One quick blip of Internet

  After days of disconnection

  Streak of startling lines

  Train blown up in India

  Someone famous dies

  Guerilla actions

  Military movements

  Bridges bombed

  Buckets and bags of sadness

  Don’t want

  Don’t want to know

  any of it

  Want any?

  No

  The White Cat

  I never heard his name. Does he have a name?

  Right before I rose to give a public lecture in Cairo, in a room far too fancy for a simple person like myself—ornate carvings in the ceiling, Oriental rugs, fine intricate windows—a white cat walked confidently down the center aisle of the hall and stepped onto the platform at the front, where I was being introduced. He looked at me, with an “Ah, there you are!” look and sat right beside me while I gave my talk. I had looked up the word “lecture” in the dictionary beforehand and discovered the source of the quiver in my stomach—“lecture” means something stern someone gives you, a life lesson sort of thing. Also, a formal reproof, a reprimand.

  No thanks.

  I didn’t have that. I had scrambled bits and pieces, poems, quotes, a weird outfit, bits of paper written on by 8-year-olds, and a vagrant white cat. Somehow the cat—most pure discourse offered that afternoon—never entered the comments I made to the audience, which in retrospect seems strange. It is so easy to make a joke out of something right next to you. But there was a sanctity about him. There was also the chance I was the only one seeing him. He seemed ghostly and I felt quite disembodied and no one else was looking at him. He just sat there, then left at the end of the talk, stepping neatly out of the room. I did not see him for the next week. Dodging all over Cairo in wild taxicabs and the underground Metro, riding a fellucca sailboat on the Nile at sundown, stomping here and there, I saw many other cats (Cairo is famous for cats) but not that one. Till I was preparing to leave the school campus where I had worked—over by one of the security stations (where only days before I had a slight fracas with a security agent who wanted to hold on to my passport, which I did not like—What if he took off with it? What if I needed identification while on campus?), the same white cat rose out of some low bushes, sleepily, and stepped over the cobblestones daintily to press against my legs.

  In two simple acts of movement, he welcomed me to campus and told me farewell. It is difficult to predict what our finest moments will be, but we know when they happen.

  Ducks in Couples

  Four pairs of ducks

  Swimming in strong circles

  In the lake

  Heads down

  Kicking hard

  Four perfect clots of spinning duck

  In perfect harmonic movement

  Trying to lift the bits of tasty debris

  From the bottom of the lake

  I didn’t know this at first

  Thought a mating ritual might be underway

  But discovered later what they were doing

  On that day when human beings in the world

  Continued to kill one another

  Because their imaginations

  Were broken sticks

  Without any feathers

  Campaigning Door to Door

  Maybe we will not

  vote

  no candidate is worth US

  we are

  patriotic Americans

  guarding our precious American gloom

  pinned to our screens

  and incomplete yard projects

  Who? BEAT IT!

  When is

  early voting? No I did not

  think about it yet I have a lot

  on my mind

  You can’t get
me

  to do

  anything

  Parents of Murdered Palestinian Boy Donate His Organs to Israelis

  Ahmed Ismail Khatib, you died,

  but you have so many bodies now.

  You became a much bigger boy.

  You became a girl too—

  your kidneys, your liver, your heart.

  So many people needed what you had.

  In a terrible moment,

  your parents pressed against

  spinning cycles of revenge

  to do something better.

  They stretched.

  What can that say to the rest of us?

  In the photograph your hand

  is raised to your chin—position of thought.

  This was not your intention.

  But people you will never meet are cheering.

  Please keep telling us something true.

  Because of your kidneys, your liver, your heart—

  we must—simply must—be bigger too.

  Before I Read The Kite Runner

  I held it on my lap on the plane in Cairo while other passengers were boarding. It seemed like a good book to read, finally, on such a long flight. I’d had it since it came out, but now the time felt right. Two men from Yemen across the aisle, who had been snoozing when the Egypt passengers first boarded, pointed and said, “Good book! Good book!” Some women from Germany patted my head and said, “We loved that book.” An American man with his wife leaned over and said, “It opened our eyes.” What a surprise! Everyone on the plane seemed to have read it before me. And they were all my friends simply because I was holding it!