A Maze Me Read online

& the other for serving & cleaning

  & you took turns.

  Then you started thinking, What does he like?

  What might suit his fancy?

  There should of course be meals

  at all peace talks,

  as there is eating at festivals & birthdays,

  the generous platter, the giant bowl.

  Those who placed a minor faith in rhyme,

  might try PEACE & CEASE, as in,

  could you please CEASE this hideous

  waste of time & resources, world?

  Had some people forgotten

  just how lucky we are

  to be BORN? People had grown too far

  from the source, that’s for sure.

  A man said ETHICS as if it were

  a dirty word.

  And what about apologizing to kids?

  After TEACHing us to use words to solve

  our differences, what did adults do?

  People two years old were starting to look

  a lot better than anyone else

  & consider their vocabularies.

  EAT was probably in there.

  Sweet DREAMS & PLEASE which also contained

  those crucial vowels found in PEACE

  if anyone were still thinking about it.

  This didn’t always work though,

  because some might say WAR contained

  the first two letters of ART

  & you would not want them

  for one minute to believe that.

  To the Tree Frogs Outside the Window

  Tree frogs, we were born wrong.

  Why didn’t we get a song like you?

  Something we could all sing together?

  In the big dark, strumming our throats?

  All night, branches alive outside our screens,

  you paddle the long boat,

  nothing could sink

  on a note like yours.

  I’d press myself against that twisty bark,

  be part of the leaves.

  I’d shrink, stretch free

  of these heavy syllables,

  curving perfectly into chorus,

  something we could all sing

  together, yes

  Messages from Everywhere

  light up our backyard.

  A bird that flew five thousand miles

  is trilling six bright notes.

  This bird flew over mountains and valleys

  and tiny dolls and pencils

  of children I will never see.

  Because this bird is singing to me,

  I belong to the wide wind,

  the people far away who share

  the air and the clouds.

  Together we are looking up

  into all we do not own

  and we are listening.

  SECTION FIVE

  Something True

  Day After Halloween, Jack-o’-Lantern Candle All Burned Out

  at dawn

  on the sidewalk

  a single shiny crow

  pecking the stringy heart of a

  pumpkin

  exactly the same color as

  sky

  What Travel Does

  My uncle comes home from Siberia

  describing the smoked caribou leg

  still wearing its hoof

  left on the drainboard

  week after week,

  small knives slicing

  sour red flesh.

  He becomes a vegetarian.

  But he misses the spaciousness.

  It wasn’t crowded up there.

  He ran into a polar bear

  the same way you might run into your

  mailman around the block.

  My teacher returns from China

  obsessed by the two-string violin

  and the tiny birds in lattice cages.

  She plays a tape

  as we do our silent reading.

  My whole family comes back from Paris

  asking why we live anywhere else.

  Every interesting person

  and tucked neck scarf

  looked full of stories.

  People paused for peach tarts and crepes

  in the middle of the afternoon.

  My grandfather comes home

  from Palestine

  older.

  He has been in the camps.

  He can’t stop aching.

  After Mexico, my neighbor Lupe

  misses intense color,

  won’t wear beige anymore.

  She prefers papayas sliced

  with lime juice drizzled on top.

  She feels happy every time she faces south.

  Abandoned Post Office, Big Bend

  Forty years ago this postal window

  far far far from any city

  closed for good.

  Where did everyone go?

  Wooden cubbyholes

  bear family names:

  Wilson, Gibbs, Ramirez, Talley.

  Someone has mailed them

  dust.

  Puff of wind

  special delivery

  and a little smoke rises.

  Hello?

  How much hope

  how many thin slivers

  long whistles

  linen envelopes

  found you here?

  Did you ever go a year

  without mail?

  Beyond us every direction

  desert mountains sky

  write letters back and forth all day.

  Tarantula scribbles a stone.

  Fat-tailed fox signs with a flourish.

  People aren’t your kind anymore:

  Wilson, Gibbs, Ramirez, Talley.

  We’re not that tough.

  We have a car and bottles of water.

  Each other’s voices holding us up.

  Learning to Talk

  In some places

  you can feel

  perfect bird-lit air

  with human talk nudged up against.

  Talk and the velvet drapery of silence.

  Deep evening echoes stitched by doves.

  That’s how I want to talk.

  Not chatter chatter chatter.

  Well, sometimes chatter chatter chatter

  but also solid as adobe without cracks.

  Also, water in the well.

  Listen listen listen.

  Hard to put together the pink hems

  of sunrise and sunset

  and the talkers on TV.

  People beat talk into a froth.

  Whip it up like a beverage.

  We not only say

  but say we’re going to say

  and say we said.

  O kiss the silent ground!

  The cool place under the bummiest cactus!

  There was a cat with no tail

  darted out from behind a yucca this morning

  little gray sparrow snagged in his teeth

  shamelessly doing what he was born to do

  and NOT ONE WORD.

  Over the Weather

  We forget about the spaciousness above the clouds

  but

  it’s up there.

  The sun’s up there too.

  When words we hear don’t fit the day,

  when we worry

  what we did or didn’t do,

  what if we close our eyes,

  say any word we love

  that makes us feel calm,

  slip it into the atmosphere

  and rise?

  Creamy miles of quiet.

  Giant swoop of blue.

  On the Sunset Limited Train

  In the dining car, the couple from New Jersey

  pressed their faces to the windows, anxious

  for what they had waited all their lives to see,

  the Pecos River and its high, brave bridge.

  Good thing it is light, my dad said.

  The sun had just risen.

  When did you firs
t start thinking about it?

  So long ago! They stared at one another, shining.

  West of the Pecos, such wonderful words!

  Because that is the wild true land

  beginning from there,

  from the tall cliffs and the green river gash,

  unfolding west, the land is stronger than anything,

  it is the old song of land and air

  we have never gotten to sing.

  And we who had seen it many times

  faced the glorious window

  filled with the breaking light of day.

  Across the Aisle

  The little girl

  with a floppy purple hair ribbon

  coughed her way

  across the Atlantic.

  She coughed every 30 seconds

  for seven whole hours.

  No wonder she was fussy

  before the plane took off,

  pulling her father’s pant leg,

  and whining.

  Something had gotten into her,

  a whale trapped in her tiny lungs,

  a restless pressing dolphin,

  and she would be tied into a seat

  for hours while it tried to get out.

  She never once covered her mouth.

  I felt angry at her father and mother

  who seemed not to have discovered

  cough syrup, cough drops,

  or hot tea with lemon and honey.

  38,000 feet below us

  waves were roiling up

  from a deep darkness in the sea

  and fish who do not mind the cold

  were gliding around in secrecy.

  Mona’s Taco

  Dear Mona, do you know

  how your old stucco building

  marks the spot of Something True?

  Your hand-lettered red sign rises up

  like a crooked, friendly flag.

  I can guess the menu:

  bean & cheese, potato & egg,

  maybe a specialty of your own making,

  avocado twist or smoky salsa.

  Your nombre is nice.

  One taco might be enough.

  You feed the ranchers who just lived through

  the worst drought and flood back-to-back.

  They touch the brims of their hats

  when they see you.

  Don’t we all need someone to greet us

  to make us feel alive?

  West of town, soft fields

  ease our city-cluttered eyes.

  There’s a rim of hills to hope for up ahead.

  Mona, mysterious Mona,

  I don’t have to eat with you to love you.

  Every morning I think, Mona’s up.

  A Way Around

  Argument

  is a room I won’t enter.

  Some of us

  would circle a whole house

  not to enter it.

  If you want to talk like that,

  try a tree.

  A tree is patient.

  Don’t try me.

  To My Texas Handbook

  Don’t ever say

  there’s nothing to see

  in Ruidosa.

  That’s mean.

  If you are really Texas

  or Minnesota or North Dakota

  or Georgia or Ohio

  you should know

  there’s something strong to see

  everywhere.

  Over

  and out.

  Thoughts That Came in Floating

  1

  The land waits for rain to write on it.

  Pool of birdseed, ring around the moon.

  Night, that beautiful dark broom,

  sweeps the day away.

  2

  But people are still fighting.

  Far off, where we can’t see or hear them.

  We can barely imagine

  our own familiar neighborhoods

  blowing up—poof!

  Everything being broken or gone.

  So dumb!

  No kid in the world wakes up hoping

  people will fight around her house

  or inside it either.

  3

  Electric networks

  under the thin skin of hours,

  ticking, stretching…

  Two jackrabbits pause

  in the long grasses of the orchard

  side by side…

  I want to talk truly as a rooster . . .

  Hide inside a pocket of days . . .

  4

  My mind

  is always

  open.

  I don’t think

  there’s even

  a door.

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  About the Author

  NAOMI SHIHAB NYE has received a Lannan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award. She says of A Maze Me, “Whenever I meet a girl who’s about eleven or twelve or thirteen or even older, I want to talk to her. Ask her things. See what she’s looking at, off beyond the world we can see together. It’s a huge time in life, that delicious and complicated movement from one era to another, and it can feel like a treasure or a precipice or both. I remember it well.”

  The poet lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Books by Naomi Shihab Nye

  I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?

  Time You Let Me In

  There Is No Long Distance Now

  A Maze Me

  Credits

  Cover art © 2005 by Terre Maher

  Cover © 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers

  Cover design by Paul Zakris

  Copyright

  A MAZE ME: POEMS FOR GIRLS. Text copyright © 2005 by Naomi Shihab Nye. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  “Every Cat Has a Story” appeared in Instructor.

  “Little Blanco River” appeared in Poetry from A to Z, edited by Paul Janeczko.

  “Messages from Everywhere” appeared in Creative Classroom.

  “Mona’s Taco” appeared in The Texas Observer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nye, Naomi Shihab.

  A maze me : poems for girls / by Naomi Shihab Nye

  p. cm.

  “Greenwillow Books.”

  ISBN 0-06-058189-1 (trade). ISBN 0-06-058190-5 (lib. bdg.)

  EPub Edition © May 2015 ISBN 9780062340757

  1. Girls—Juvenile poetry. 2. Children’s poetry, American. 3. Maturation (Psychology)—Juvenile poetry. [1. Girls—Poetry. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Poetry. 3. American poetry.] I. Title: Amaze me. II. Title.

  PS3564.Y44S94 2005 811'.54—dc22 2004003283

  FIRST EDITION 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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