Naomi Shihab Nye’s Poem on Loss and Kindness

Victor Hugo’s claim that ‘Those who do not weep do not see,’ is echoed here by poet Naomi Shihab Nye in her poem Kindness. Sorrow and grief will soften and open up our hearts, priming them for kindness and compassion in a way that’s never quite possible before the experience of a devastating loss. Our sorrows are interwoven like a tapestry, Nye writes; if we live them out fully, we can ‘catch the thread of all sorrows’ and ‘see the size of the cloth’. Kindness will then follow, like a shadow and like a friend.

Kindness 

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever. 

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive. 

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth. 

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend. 

Naomi Shihab Nye

From: Words Under the Words – Selected Poems