Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "Lights in the Windows" by Naomi Shihab Nye (@1995 by The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents).

The narrator is a Palestinian American and an award-winning author of poetry, fiction, and children's literature.

Years ago a girl handed me a note as I was leaving her proud town of Albany, Texas, a tiny, lovely place far in the west of our big state. "I'm glad to know there is another poemist in the world," the note said. "I always knew we would find one another someday and our lights would cross."

Our lights would cross. That girl had not stood out to me, I realized, among the other upturned, interested faces in the classroom. How many other lights had I missed? I carried her smudged note for thousands of miles.

I was fascinated with the earliest poems I read and heard that gave insight into all the secret territories of the human spirit, our relationships with one another. Somehow those glimpses felt comforting, like looking through the lit windows of other people's homes at dusk, before they closed the curtains. How did otherpeople live their lives? Just a sense of so many other-worlds out there, beginning with the next house on my own street, gave me a great energy. How could anyone ever feel lonely? One of the first books I loved in my life was a thick, gray anthology edited by Helen Ferris, called Favorite Poems Old and New. Rich, intelligent voices spoke to me each time I opened its covers. I found Rabindranath Tagore, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson, living side by side. I imagined I was part of a much larger family.

To me the world of poetry is a huse with thousands of glittering windows. Our words and images, land to land, era to era, shed light on one another. Our words dissolve the shadows we imagine fall between. "One night I dreamt of spring," writes Syrian poet Muhammad al Maghut, "and when I awoke / flowers covered my pillow." Isn't this where empathy begins? Other countries stop seeming quite so "foreign," or inanimate, or strange, when we listen to the intimate voices of their citizens. I can never understand it when teachers claim they are "uncomfortable" with poetry—as if poetry demands they be anything other than responsive, curious human beings. If poetry comes out of the deepest places in the human soul and experience, shouldn't it be as important to learn about one another's poetry, country to country, as one another's weather or gross national products? It seems critical to me. It's another way to study geography!

Anyone who feels poetry is an alien or ominous form should consider the style in which human beings think. "How do you think?" I ask my students. "Do you think in complete, elaborate sentences? In fully developed paragraphs with careful footnotes? Or in flashes and bursts of images, snatches of lines leaping one to the next, descriptive fragments, sensory details? "We think in poetry. But some people pretend poetry is far away.

Probably some of us were taught so long and hard that poetry was a thing to analyze that we lost our ability to find it delicious, to appreciate its taste, sometimes even when we couldn't completely apprehend its meaning. I love to offer students a poem now and then that I don't really understand. It presents them with the immediate opportunity of being smarter than I am. Believe me, they always take it. They always find an interesting way to look through its window.

I'm reminded of a dear teacher I had in high school who refused to go on to the next poem in our antiquated textbook until we had all agreed on the same interpretive vision of each poem—her vision. If we can offer each other a cognizance of mystery through the poems we share, isn't that a greater gift? Won't a sense of inevitable mystery underpinning our intricate lives serve us better than the notion that we will each be given a neat set of blanks to fill in—always?

Poems respect our ability to interpret and translate images and signs. Poems link seemingly disparate parts of experience—this seems particularly critical today. I have yet to meet one person in all my travels who doesn't say they are too busy, they wish they had a little more time. If most of us have lost, as some poets suggest, our meaningful, deep relationships with the world of nature, poems help us, to see and feel that world again, beyond our cities and double-locked doors. I have learned as much about nature from the poems of Mary Oliver as I have ever learned walking in the woods.

And since we now live in a world where activities in one person's woods have a direct relationship on countries far away—the disappearing rain forests in southern Mexico and Hawaii and the changing weather everywhere, for example—we need to know one another. It is an imperative, not a luxury.