My Father and the Fig Tree

For other fruits, my father was indifferent. 

He'd point at the cherry trees and say, 

"See those? I wish they were figs."
In the evening he sat by my beds 

weaving folktales like vivid little scarves. 

They always involved a fig tree.
Even when it didn't fit, he'd stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep. 

Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged. 

"That's not what I'm talking about! he said,
"I'm talking about a fig straight from the earth – 

gift of Allah! -- on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I'm talking about picking the largest, fattest, 

sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth."
(Here he'd stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets. 

"Plant one!" my mother said.
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water, 

let the okra get too big.
"What a dreamer he is. Look how many
things he starts and doesn't finish."

The last time he moved, I got a phone call, 

My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I'd never heard. "What's that?"
He took me out back to the new yard. 

There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,

a tree with the largest, fattest, 

sweetest fig in the world.
"It's a figtree song!" he said, 

plucking his fruits like ripe tokens, 

emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.

--Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Ferguson-born Palestinian-American poet, translator, and author, from 19 Varieties of Gazelle.

Joha is a trickster in Arab tales.

Scripture reference: Mark 13:24-37 (Advent 1B)

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence, 

which knew it would inherit the earth 

before anybody said so. 

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds 

watching him from the birdhouse. 

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek. 

The idea you carry close to your bosom 

is famous to your bosom. 

The boot is famous to the earth, 

more famous than the dress shoe, 

which is famous only to floors. 

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it 

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured. 

I want to be famous to shuffling men 

who smile while crossing streets, 

sticky children in grocery lines, 

famous as the one who smiled back. 

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, 

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, 

but because it never forgot what it could do.

--Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Ferguson born Palestinian-Amercan poet and author.

Valentine for Ernest Mann

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Ferguson-born Palestinian American poet

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

--Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Ferguson-born Palestinian-American poet, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, 1995

Daily

These shriveled seeds we plant, 

corn kernel, dried bean, 

poke into loosened soil, 

cover over with measured fingertips 

These T-shirts we fold 

into perfect white squares 

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips 

This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl 

This bed whose covers I straighten 

smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown 

blanket 

and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address 

so the name balances like a cloud 

in the center of sky

This page I type and retype 

This table I dust till the scarred wood shines 

This bundle of clothes I wash and hang 

and wash again 

like flags we share, a country so close 

no one needs to name it 

The days are nouns: touch them 

The hands are churches that worship the world

--Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Palestinian-American poet, from Words Under Words: Selected Poems, 1995

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds. 
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

--Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Palestinian-American St.  Louis-born poet, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, 1995.

Prayer In My Boot

For the boy who does not know the answer

For the graceful handle I found in a field
attached to nothing
pray it is universally applicable

For our tracks which disappear
the moment we leave them

For the face peering through the cafe window
as we sip our soup

For cheerful American classrooms sparkling
with crisp colored alphabets
happy cat posters
the cage of the guinea pig
the dog with division flying out of his tail
and the classrooms of our cousins
on the other side of the earth
how solemn they are
how gray or green or plain
how there is nothing dangling
nothing striped or polka-dotted or cheery

no self-portaits or visions of cupids
and in these rooms the students raise their hands
and learn the stories of the world

For library books in alphabetical order
and family businesses that failed
and the house with the boarded windows
and the gap in the middle of a sentence
and the envelope we keep mailing ourselves

For every hopeful morning given and given
and every future rough edge
and every afternoon
turning over in its sleep

--Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Palestinian-Amiercan poet, writer, and anthologist, from 19 Varieties of Gazelle:Poems of the Middle East, 1994

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywher
 like a shadow or a friend.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Palestinian-American poet and author, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, 1995

Related Scripture: Micah 6:1-8, Epiphany 4A