Humps of shell emerge from dark water. <br />Believers toss hunks of bread, <br />hoping the fat reptilian heads <br />will loom forth from the murk <br />and eat. Meaning: you have been <br />heard. <br /> <br />I stood, breathing the stench of mud <br />and rotten dough, and could not feel <br />encouraged. Climbed the pilgrim hill <br />where prayers in tissue radiant tubes <br />were looped to a tree. Caught in <br />their light, a hope washed over me <br />small as the hope of stumbling feet <br />but did not hold long enough <br />to get me down. <br /> <br />Rickshas crowded the field, <br />announced by tinny bells. <br />The friend beside me, whose bread <br />floated and bobbed, <br />grew grim. They’re full, I told him. <br />But they always eat mine. <br /> <br />That night I told the man I love most <br />he came from hell. It was also <br />his birthday. We gulped lobster <br />over a white tablecloth in a country <br />where waves erase whole villages, annually, <br />and don’t even make our front page. <br />Waiters forded the lulling currents <br />of heat. Later, my mosquito net <br />had holes. <br /> <br />All night, I was pitching something, <br />crumbs or crusts, into that bottomless pool <br />where the spaces between our worlds take root. <br />He would forgive me tomorrow. <br />But I wanted a mouth to rise up <br />from the dark, a hand, <br />any declarable body part, to swallow <br />or say, This is water, that is land.<br /><br />Naomi Shihab Nye<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-turtle-shrine-near-chittagong/
