You Know Who You Are (Naomi Shihab Nye)

anticipating


posted by Lissa mcKinley on Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Edit





ok, so my hair is loosening! I had forgotten this weirdness, but I'm beginning to remember. My hair feels very strange and as of this morning, I am losing bits of it here and there......a little disconcerting, but at least we know the medicine is doing something! I am planning on another easy chemo session #3 tomorrow so send lots of emails in the morning to keep me busy. I have been seeing a woman at a salon who is going to make a wig for me....do you think perhaps black hair this time? Green? think of my options! She is sure that it will look just like my hair.....we'll see. I am going on friday to have my hair cut very short an then we are going to Canada for a week. All the hair loss should be finished by then and the wig will too.



I love this poem and I take comfort in it:







You Know Who You Are (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 straight.







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.