You Know Who You Are by Naomi Shihab Nye

You Know Who You Are
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Why do your poems comfort me, I ask myself.
Because they are upright, like straight-backed chairs.
I can sit in them and study the world as if it too
were simple and upright.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.
Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together,
they float.
I want to tell you about the afternoon
I floated on your poems
all the way from Durango Street to Broadway.

Fathers were paddling on the river with their small sons.
Three Mexican boys chased each other outside the library.
Everyone seemed to have some task, some occupation,
while I wandered uselessly in the streets I claim to love.

Suddenly I felt the precise body of your poems beneath me,
like a raft, I felt words as something portable again,
a cup, a newspaper, a pin.
Everything happening had a light around it,
not the light of Catholic miracles,
the blunt light of a Saturday afternoon.
Light in a world that rushes forward with us or without us.
I wanted to stop and gather up the blocks behind me
in this light, but it doesn’t work.
You keep walking, lifting one foot, then the other,
saying “This is what I need to remember”
and then hoping you can.

from:  "Words Under the Words" by Naomi Shihab Nye, page 22

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Wild Spring storms here in the swamp today.  So far, Spring has been violent as if the earth is giving birth...not an "easy" birth, but a difficult, excruciating, wildly harrowing birth. 

Today is "Poem in Your Pocket" day.  April is National Poetry Month which I don't celebrate because every single hour of every day is Poetry Day here at Casa Dragonfly. 

xo,
Marion

PS:  Congratulations to the illustrious, amazingly brilliant Sharon Olds for winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 2013, for her book "Stag's Leap".

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You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. ~Joseph Joubert

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Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. ~Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest

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