Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
Always Be
naomi shihab nye
In 93 years
my mother has said
many strange things
but yesterday
the strangest.
When I leave here
maybe you can go with me.
What?
Like my neighbors did.
The daughter died
right after the mother,
everyone shocked.
She hadn’t been ill.
Or my mom’s Italian friends
years ago
who died on the same day
not from an accident.
What?
We’ll be together in heaven.
I don’t think she believes in heaven.
She just wants me
to clean up after her,
what I did all my life,
sweeping crumbs,
scrubbing plates.
She’ll always be
with me.
I prop her broom against
the wall.
Miriam Naomi Shihab died on Thanksgiving, 2021.
Legacy of Lockdown
We were home and then we were home.
We watched TV for a straight week
during the insurrection.
Viewed old movies with
a completely different perspective.
Once younger than Dustin Hoffman,
now older than Anne Bancroft.
Nothing seemed as shocking.
The F word no longer a dagger.
We sat on the couch
or a green velveteen chair.
After nine months my husband asked
if I wanted to change places.
I did not.
He refused to take the Christmas tree down.
I kept stirring garbanzos with rice.
The creak in our gate sang a sweet song.
Someone was dropping off a package
or a cake.
Important to drop things off
at people’s houses
if you hoped some things
might come to yours.
Back and forth seclusion
a quiet rhythm.
Mohammed Reza Shajarian’s
Tiny Desk concert my anthem.
Tomatoes and lettuce kept producing
through January as if to say
you need more salads
when you stay home this much.
Dead Branch
I’ve fallen in love
with the dead pecan branch
outside my window.
Small birds flock
to twisty branches
to sing for me.
They open their beaks,
chorus their little hearts out.
At first I hoped
a big wind would snap
the branch off.
Now it’s a treasure.
Poem Menu
For Chula Reynolds
Dear Chula, remember how discussing odd phrases
gave us pleasure – to be “out of sorts” or “beside oneself”
because when did people ever feel “in sorts” or
“inside oneself” or mention when they did? Somehow our echoes,
floating conversations from college days, are helping me
hold the quarantine more kindly. We’re all okay…but just this moment
how many gasp and die? Who could not feel out of one’s mind?
While we putter around our cozy homes, staying “safe and sane”
as all the letters finish now, the count ticks up.
Feeling beside myself at every minute?
Here’s my hope: those surviving will get a menu.
A set of sweeter memories, an unfinished song.
New plans. A group of phrases folded on a beautiful card,
like the “Poem Menus” on hospital trays
in Ireland, the “Poems for Patience” I was asked
to pick one year for hospital trays
and waiting rooms, voices one might wish to meet,
beside the pudding or jello.
It was the best job I ever had.
While recovering from surgery or sickness,
a patient would find a surprise toast to Back-to-Life,
Slow Time, succulent words nicely arranged,
and maybe feel their own groggy heads echoing response –
oh, that reminds me of… then something more to think about.
How millions are wishing you all longer lives. Ourselves, as well.
But where is hither and yon, for example?
Do they have the virus there?
The Road Between San Antonio and Comstock, Texas
I think of it as a bloodline, clean thread stretching west, the mind emptying
so gently as it ranged farther from billboards, chains, farther
from access roads, exits, deeper into sky, that road is why I love this state,
despite politics, pronouncements, the boy called Cody in Comstock who wrote me,
a year after I visited his class, Basically poetry changed everything, it made me see
where I was, could you please come back and stay forever? Finding his letter in a box
thirty years later, looking him up to learn he died young, a cowboy hat over his downturned face,
I want to say Your roads are still stretching outwards, the fields you walked through, we are here
soaking in the mystery of time, trapped in our little houses, scared of a virus,
feeling connected through the spaces, all of these new ways, and I remember you.
(Note: The first 3 poems first appeared in slightly different revisions in Conestoga Zen.)
Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the U.S. Her most recent books are The Turtle of Michigan, The Tiny Journalist, Everything Comes Next, Collected & New Poems, Cast Away, and Voices in the Air. She is on faculty at Texas State University and believes with all her heart that assault weapons should be banned from planet earth.
Read more of Naomi’s poetry on Instagram!
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