Lauren+Mobly

=Praise=

Are now gone.
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= = = = = = = = =3 Poems By: Naomi Shihab Nye= __1.Courage__ A word must travel through a tongue and teeth and wide air to get there. A word has tough skin

To be let in, A word must slide And sneak And spin Into the tunnel of the ear What’s to fear? Everything. But a word Is brave.

__2. Try to Name What Doesn’t Change__ Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change is train tracks. She’s sure of it. The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery by the side, but not the tracks. I’ve watched one for three years, she says, and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore. The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens. The widow in the tilted house spices her soup with cinnamon. Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode. The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals. The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound but when it goes away, shrinking back from the walls of the brain, it takes something different with it every time.

__3. During a War__ Best wishes to you & yours, he closes the letter.

For a moment I can’t fold it up again— where does “yours” end? Dark eyes pleading what could we have done differently? Your family, your community, circle of earth, we did not want, we tried to stop, we were not heard by dark eyes who are dying now. How easily they would have welcomed us in for coffee, serving it in a simple room with a radiant rug. Your friends & mine.