A Voice So Swollen...it wont' fit your ears

Some afternoons
thud unexpectedly
and split into four pieces
on the floor.

Two large pieces, two small ones.
I could glue them back,
but what would I use them for?

Forgive me when I answer you
in a voice so swollen
it won’t fit your ears.

Words are finding their way back to me, but they are heavy

and they THUD and they are not pleasing to the ear.

So forgive me if I choose silence over the din...for awhile....

                                      *********

On "Good Letters", The IMAGE JOURNAL BLOG, Peggy Rosenthal writes

"What I treasure here—as in many of Nye’s poems—is her gift for domesticating the wild terrors of human experience, so that whatever befalls us in the wide painful world can be brought home. A simple broken bowl: Nye has a way of making small things like this “hit home” in the largest sense, home at the core of our hearts where all the evil of the universe brings its torment and all the good comes to rest....

Because “some afternoons” truly do “thud” in on us. I think of the roaring thud of natural disasters around the world, tearing down homes and ripping families apart. I think of the thud of a bomb on the home of an Afghani family, their bodies split into horribly uncountable “pieces / on the floor.” And I think of the crashes in my life and in the lives of people dear to me..."

poem: from Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Breaking My Favorite Bowl” ( Words Under the Words).

 

photos: sandig.urbanspace