16 pages • 32 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Through figurative language and a focus on both the natural world and material objects, Shihab Nye has crafted a poem that evokes the loneliness and nihilism of loss, as well as the importance of elder voices in community. Shihab Nye’s relationship to her own heritage and family gives this poem an even more poignant feeling, and highlights the sense of grief that pervades it.
In this free-verse poem, the speaker wonders at the changes to their community brought about by the deaths of neighborhood elders. By opening with the line, “One by one” (Line 1), the speaker immediately hints at a burgeoning existential anxiety—counting down the deaths that are occurring—and begins to lay out the contrasts that define the poem, setting the tone for the poem’s emphasis on materially small yet emotionally seismic changes to the neighborhood.
Shihab Nye uses the metaphor “going up into the air” (Line 5) to describe the deaths of “the old people of our neighborhood” (Lines 2-3). Like the rest of the poem, this metaphor focuses on a physical experience of death. The lines describing the dead rising into the air acknowledge their absence while maintaining their mysticism and their special significance to the narrator.
By Naomi Shihab Nye
300 Goats
300 Goats
Naomi Shihab Nye
Blood
Blood
Naomi Shihab Nye
Burning the Old Year
Burning the Old Year
Naomi Shihab Nye
Different Ways to Pray
Different Ways to Pray
Naomi Shihab Nye
Famous
Famous
Naomi Shihab Nye
Gate A-4
Gate A-4
Naomi Shihab Nye
Jerusalem
Jerusalem
Naomi Shihab Nye
Kindness
Kindness
Naomi Shihab Nye
Making a Fist
Making a Fist
Naomi Shihab Nye
Morning Song
Morning Song
Naomi Shihab Nye
My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop
My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop
Naomi Shihab Nye
Shoulders
Shoulders
Naomi Shihab Nye
The Art of Disappearing
The Art of Disappearing
Naomi Shihab Nye
The Rider
The Rider
Naomi Shihab Nye
The Turtle of Oman
The Turtle of Oman
Naomi Shihab Nye
The Words Under the Words
The Words Under the Words
Naomi Shihab Nye
Valentine for Ernest Mann
Valentine for Ernest Mann
Naomi Shihab Nye