monday poem #13: Naomi Shihab Nye, "New Year"
I was going to post something by Lynda Hull, but then I saw melymbrosia's news of having picked up Red Suitcase and couldn't resist just one more from Naomi Shihab Nye. This is the last of hers for a while - or at least until the urge to share "French Movies" becomes overwhelming.
New Year
Maybe the street is tired of being a street.
They tell how it used to be called Bois D'Arc,
now called Main, how boys in short pants
caught crawdads for supper at a stone acequia
now covered over.
Sometimes the street sweeper stops his machine
and covers his eyes.
Think of the jobs people have.
The girl weighing citron in the basement
of H. L. Green's for a man who says
he can't wait to make fruitcake
and she says, What is this stuff anyway
before it looks like this? and he leaves
on his cane, slowly, clutching the bag.
Later she weighs garlic for a trucker.
Think of the streams of headlights
on the Houston freeway all headed somewhere
and where they will be headed after that.
After so long, even jets might be tired of acceleration,
slow-down, touching-ground-again,
as a child is so tired of his notebook
he pastes dinosaurs on it to render it extinct.
Or the teacher, tired of questions,
hearing the anthem How long does it have to be?
play itself over and over in sleep
and she just doesn't know. As long as you want it.
What was this world? Where things you never did
felt more real than what happened.
Your friend's dishtowel strung over her faucet
was a sentence which could be diagrammed
while your tumbled life, that basket of phrases,
had too many ways it might fit together.
Where a street might just as easily have been
a hair ribbon in a girl's ponytail
her first day of dance class, teacher in mauve leotard
rising to say, We have much ahead of us,
and the little girls following, kick, kick, kick,
thinking what a proud sleek person she was,
how they wanted to be like her someday,
while she stared outside the window at the high wires
strung with ice, the voices inside them opening out
to every future which was not hers.
- Naomi Shihab Nye
from Yellow Glove
reprinted in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems