The Small Vases from Hebron

By Naomi Shihab Nye b. 1952

Tip their mouths open to the sky.

Turquoise, amber,

the deep green with fluted handle,

pitcher the size of two thumbs,

tiny lip and graceful waist.

Here we place the smallest flower

which could have lived invisibly

in loose soil beside the road,

sprig of succulent rosemary,

bowing mint.

They grow deeper in the center of the table.

Here we entrust the small life,

thread, fragment, breath.

And it bends. It waits all day.

As the bread cools and the children

open their gray copybooks

to shape the letter that looks like

a chimney rising out of a house.

And what do the headlines say?

Nothing of the smaller petal

perfectly arranged inside the larger petal

or the way tinted glass filters light.

Men and boys, praying when they died,

fall out of their skins.

The whole alphabet of living,

heads and tails of words,

sentences, the way they said,

“Ya’Allah!” when astonished,

or “ya’ani” for “I mean”—

a crushed glass under the feet

still shines.

But the child of Hebron sleeps

with the thud of her brothers falling

and the long sorrow of the color red.

Source: Fuel (BOA Editions Ltd., 1998)

Biography

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and Nye spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. Her experience of both cultural difference and different cultures has influenced much of her work. Known for poetry that lends a fresh perspective to ordinary events, people, and objects, Nye has said that, . . .

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