Kindness

          Karen Glenn, my good friend who lives in Carbondale, Colorado, has been sending out poetry each week to her friends and colleagues for years. I read every one of them, not only because I love Karen but because her taste is so uncannily good. Karen, a gifted poet herself, has an instinct for poems that resonate with the mood of the moment-sometimes offbeat, quirky ones, sometimes older. more famous ones, but always poems that seem to me to capture the zeitgeist. Last night she sent this, a work by Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye (1952 – ), who was born in Missouri, Nye grew up in Jordan, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas. “She is known,” Karen writes, “both for her poems about Arab-American life and for her all-embracing humanity.”

           When I read it. I had just heard from a friend who’d lost her job, and humanity, if I were to find the right word, was sure on my mind. In a culture ravaged by similar job losses and by money scams and by fears about the future that Americans never dreamt they’d be facing, this Love Goddess has been worried about the toll taken on love. Not only love between couples and between friends, but among strangers. And then this poem arrived.  Karen did it again. Next time I’ll send you a poem written by Karen. Meanwhile, here’s “Kindness.”

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 mail letters and purchase 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 every where
like a shadow or a friend.