19 Varieties of Gazelle by Naomi Shihab Nye

19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

By Naomi Shihab Nye

If you don’t know the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye, I recommend you give her a try.  This collection of poetry is much like the author, a blending of her Palestinian ex-pat. father and her American mother, sharing her great love of both places. 

It made me think about a very quiet and kind man I had known when I worked for a utility company who spoke of how beautiful the country in the Middle East where he was born is.  He clearly loved that place but I had the distinct impression that he never expected to see it again.  I wondered if he couldn’t go back for political reasons, but I was too shy to ask such a personal question.

This book was published the year after 9/11, and that event affected her deeply, as it did all of us, but somewhat differently than myself.  This book shares the authors feelings and thoughts beautifully.

“September 11, 2001, was not the first hideous day ever in the world, but it was the worst one many Americans had ever lived.  May we never see anther like it.  For people who love the Middle East and have an ongoing devotion to cross-cultural understanding, the day felt sickeningly tragic in more ways than one.”

There is humor and beauty in the collection, as well as the sadness and gravity.

from My Father and the Figtree

“Years passed, we lived in many houses,

none had figtrees,
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said,
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is.  Look how many
things he starts and doesn’t  finish.”

The last time he moved, I had a phone call,

my father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest figs in the world.
“It’s a figtree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.”

It was as if he had to find the tree, rather than planting it himself.

Speaking of her father in the introduction, the author says, “he was a regular customer at the local drugstore soda fountain in his new little town.  ‘He always looked dreamy, preoccupied, like he could see things other people couldn’t see,’ the druggist told me twenty-five years later.  Well yes, I thought.  That’s what immigrants look like.  They always have other worlds in their minds.”

It is Spring here and we watch the rain fall and nourish the new seedlings so that the heat makes them take root and shoot upward.   Perhaps that is why this next poem caught me.

from The Garden of Abu Mahmoud

“He said every morning found him here,

before the water boiled on the flame
he came out to this garden
dug hands into earth, saying, I know you
and earth crumbled rich layers
and this result of their knowing –
 a hillside in which no inch went unsung.
His enormous onions held light
and the trees so weighted with fruits
he tied the branches up.

And he called it querido, Corazon,

all the words of any language
connecting to the deep place
of darkness and seed.  He called it
ya habibi in Arabic, my darling tomato,
and it called him governor, king,
and some days he wore no shoes.”

Her message seems simple, but difficult in this world, peace.  I think it must come from communication and this line caught me in that thought.

from Arabic Coffee

“stay, be seated, follow the talk

wherever it goes.”