Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye
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 everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
I love Naomi so much. She’s one of the kindest and most open people I know. And these lines were influential and friends to me long before I knew her. I have this partially memorized because I have found it so true, that in my times of sorrow, the kindnesses of friends and strangers have been starkly so beautiful in my memory and this poem helps keep me open to kindness.
Some poem backdrop, Naomi wrote it shortly after she and her husband were robbed of everything on their honeymoon in Colombia, sitting on a curb in shock, and a man came over and asked her what happened. As she was telling him, news came that an Indigenous man had been killed nearby in a similar attack. The poem came to her in something like a single sitting.
