From One Poet to Another: Celebrating National Poetry Month

You Know Who You Are

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Why do your poems comfort me, I ask myself.

Because they are upright, like straight-backed chairs.

I can sit in them and study the world as if it too

were simple and upright.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words

and not one of them can save me.

Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together,

they float.

I want to tell you about the afternoon

I floated on your poems

all the way from Durango Street to Broadway.

Fathers were paddling on the river with their small sons.

Three Mexican boys chased each other outside the library.

Everyone seemed to have some task, some occupation,

while I wandered uselessly in the streets I claim to love.

Suddenly I felt the precise body of your poems beneath me,

like a raft, I felt words as something portable again,

a cup, a newspaper, a pin.

everything happening had a light around it,

not the light of Catholic miracles,

the blunt light of a Saturday afternoon.

light in a world that rushes forward with us or without us.

I wanted to stop and gather up the blocks behind me

in this light, but it doesn’t work.

You keep walking, lifting one foot, then the other,

saying “This is what I need to remember”

and then hoping you can.