The Turtle Shrine Near Chittagong

By Naomi Shihab Nye b. 1952

Humps of shell emerge from dark water.

Believers toss hunks of bread,

hoping the fat reptilian heads

will loom forth from the murk

and eat. Meaning: you have been

heard.

I stood, breathing the stench of mud

and rotten dough, and could not feel

encouraged. Climbed the pilgrim hill

where prayers in tissue radiant tubes

were looped to a tree. Caught in

their light, a hope washed over me

small as the hope of stumbling feet

but did not hold long enough

to get me down.

Rickshas crowded the field,

announced by tinny bells.

The friend beside me, whose bread

floated and bobbed,

grew grim. They’re full, I told him.

But they always eat mine.

That night I told the man I love most

he came from hell. It was also

his birthday. We gulped lobster

over a white tablecloth in a country

where waves erase whole villages, annually,

and don’t even make our front page.

Waiters forded the lulling currents

of heat. Later, my mosquito net

had holes.

All night, I was pitching something,

crumbs or crusts, into that bottomless pool

where the spaces between our worlds take root.

He would forgive me tomorrow.

But I wanted a mouth to rise up

from the dark, a hand,

any declarable body part, to swallow

or say, This is water, that is land.

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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