Tip their mouths open to the sky. <br />Turquoise, amber, <br />the deep green with fluted handle, <br />pitcher the size of two thumbs, <br />tiny lip and graceful waist. <br /> <br />Here we place the smallest flower <br />which could have lived invisibly <br />in loose soil beside the road, <br />sprig of succulent rosemary, <br />bowing mint. <br /> <br />They grow deeper in the center of the table. <br /> <br />Here we entrust the small life, <br />thread, fragment, breath. <br />And it bends. It waits all day. <br />As the bread cools and the children <br />open their gray copybooks <br />to shape the letter that looks like <br />a chimney rising out of a house. <br /> <br />And what do the headlines say? <br /> <br />Nothing of the smaller petal <br />perfectly arranged inside the larger petal <br />or the way tinted glass filters light. <br />Men and boys, praying when they died, <br />fall out of their skins. <br />The whole alphabet of living, <br />heads and tails of words, <br />sentences, the way they said, <br />“Ya’Allah!” when astonished, <br />or “ya’ani” for “I mean”— <br />a crushed glass under the feet <br />still shines. <br />But the child of Hebron sleeps <br />with the thud of her brothers falling <br />and the long sorrow of the color red.<br /><br />Naomi Shihab Nye<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-small-vases-from-hebron/
