PAIN

Poem for May 24, 2014

ARABIC

(Jordan, 1992)

The man with laughing eyes stopped smiling

to say, “Until you speak Arabic,

you will not understand pain.”

Something to do with the back of the head,

an Arab carries sorrow in the back of the head

that only language cracks, thrum of stones

weeping, grating hinge on an old metal gate.

“Once you know,” he whispered, “you can enter the room

whenever you need to. Music you heard from a distance,

the slapped drum of a stranger’s wedding,

wells up inside your skin, inside rain, a thousand

pulsing tongues. You are changed.”

Outside, the snow had finally stopped.

in a land where snow rarely falls,

we had our days grow white and still.

I thought pain had no tongue. Or every tongue

at once, supreme translator, sieve. I admit my

shame. To live on the bank of Arabic, tugging

its rich threads without understanding

how to weave the rug … I have no gift.

The sound, but not the sense.

I kept looking over his shoulders for someone else

to talk to, recalling my dying friend who only scrawled

I can’t write.  What good would any grammar have been

to her then?  I touched his arm, held it hard,

which sometimes you don’t do in the Middle East,

and said, I’ll work on it, feeling sad

for his good strict heart, but later in the slick street

hailed a taxi by shouting Pain! And it stopped

in every language and opened its doors.

© Naomi Shihab Nye (1952 - )

From Red Suitcase, © 2000