Naomi Shihab Nye

“I'm writing mostly to thank you for livingyou eighty yearsand to tell you I love youand think of you often.”

“I'm like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud's gonna burst; when it's the high or it's the low, when you might need a light jacket.Sometimes I'm the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes.I know that some people like:sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,but you take me as I am and neverforget to pack an umbrella.”

“If someday, in a morning, you see you,in a mirror or the dent of a spoon, and wonderWhere is my soul andWhere has it gone, remember this:Catch the gaze of a womanon the metro, subway, tram.Look at a man. Seek andyou will find youin the silvered space,a flash between souls.”

“maybe we try too hard to be remembered, waking to the glowing yellow disc in ignorance, swearing that today will be the day, today we will makesomething of our lives. what if we are so busy searching for worth that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird. what else is missing?maybe our steps are too straight and our paths too narrow and not overlapping. maybe when they overlap someone in another country lights a candle, a coupleresolves their argument, a young man puts down his silver gun and walks away.”

“Let me peer out at the worldthrough your lens. (Maybe I'll shudder,or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.)Let me see how your blueis my turquoise and my orangeis your gold. Suddenly binarystars, we have startlinggravity. Let's comparescintillation - let's sharestarlight.”

“like our parents alwaystold us not to likefirefighters warn againstwe're playinggames and makingthe rules upas we go we'rematchingwarmth to warmthstarting fires burningwishes into ourskin we're hiddenholdingforbidden lightswe're childrenwhose fathers havenever taught nevertouchbut we're findingthese new flameswe smotherat the sound of footsteps.”

“you will never catch up.Walk around feeling like a leafknow you could tumble at any second.Then decide what to do with your time.--The Art of Disappearing”

“The RiderA boy told meif he roller-skated fast enoughhis loneliness couldn't catch up to him,the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion.What I wonder tonightpedaling hard down King William Streetis if it translates to bicycles.A victory! To leave your lonelinesspanting behind you on some street cornerwhile you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,pink petals that have never felt loneliness,no matter how slowly they fell.”

“The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you've barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.”

“I want to be someone making music/with my coming.”

“Making a FistFor the first time, on the road north of Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me,a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.I was seven, I lay in the carwatching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin."How do you know if you are going to die?"I begged my mother.We had been traveling for days.With strange confidence she answered,"When you can no longer make a fist."Years later I smile to think of that journey,the borders we must cross separately,stamped with our unanswerable woes.I who did not die, who am still living,still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,clenching and opening one small hand.”

“KindnessBefore you know what kindness really isyou must lose things,feel the future dissolve in a momentlike salt in a weakened broth.What you held in your hand,what you counted and carefully saved,all this must go so you knowhow desolate the landscape can bebetween the regions of kindness.How you ride and ridethinking the bus will never stop,the passengers eating maize and chickenwill stare out the window forever.Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,you must travel where the Indian in a white poncholies dead by the side of the road.You must see how this could be you,how he too was someonewho journeyed through the night with plansand 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 voicecatches the thread of all sorrowsand you see the size of the cloth.Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,only kindness that ties your shoesand sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,only kindness that raises its headfrom the crowd of the world to sayIt is I you have been looking for,and then goes with you everywherelike a shadow or a friend.”

“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.”

“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 shadowsdrifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to dois live in a way that lets us find them.”

“I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.”