Naomi Shihab Nye's "Shoulders"

Thoughts on looking.

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.



from Red Suitcase (BOA Editions, 1994)

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I’ve spent the past few days digging through the archived issues of Reflections — Yale Divinity School’s literary journal and magazine, filled to the brim with poems by the like of Wendell Berry and June Jordan and Camille Rankine and more.

Today’s poem, first published in 1994, was republished in a 2009 issue of Reflections. And I know I have written about Naomi Shihab Nye’s work before, but, upon reading this poem today, I knew that I wanted to sit with it a little longer. Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry possesses this near-magical, fabulous quality, in that her poetry offers a kind of expansion by way of reduction. And I don’t mean reduction in some kind of lessening way. I mean, I think, a reduction of the peripheral — a focusing of the attention.

Here, for example, in today’s poem — an image: a father carrying his son across a road in the rain, “the hum of a boy’s dream / deep inside him.” There’s nothing else here but Nye’s focus on this image, nothing else to complicate the poem. And so Nye lingers on this moment, lets it take shape. She understands a few things by way of this lingering. She understands that the man’s attention — “looking two times north and south” — is a mark of his care. She understands, too, what is apparent even by virtue of its absence — that the man and his child are “sensitive,” are fragile, are worth protecting despite the fact that nothing other than their mere presence asks for such care to be offered toward them. There is no requirement for such care, no contractual obligation. There is just the care that is given: the cars moving wide around the two of them, the looking, the constant looking, the attention, and the carrying.

And so, from this small moment, this reduction of sorts, this narrowing of our own attention onto the ordinary — a man crossing the street with his child — Nye offers an expansive vision for our world:

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

I love Nye’s work for this. For the way it says look again or look longer or look, just look and for the way, in directing our attention towards such a moment or an object, she allows us to see the expansive in the everyday. Where we might see just two people crossing a street, Nye sees what allows for such a moment to occur, and, through such allowance, what care is present in the world. Such careful and care-filled looking also allows Nye to see where care is absent, or where the presence of care is undermined by violence. This idea is present in her poem “Green Shirt,” which reads, in full:

His mother did not wash it for this, 
for him to be carried dead by two friends
across the thirsty ground of Gaza.

That morning he put it on, she told him
he looked handsome, a fine deep color
for an unfolding day. 

Here, one object — and the care of its washing — become the doorway through which to consider, witness, and protest against the awful and tragic consequences of violence.

And Nye’s constant, undying belief in the possibility of such care is present in her often-shared poem, “Gate A-4,” which tells the story of an ordinary encounter — a woman translating a message for another woman — blossoming into something more deeply and widely involved. That poem ends with Nye writing:

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Yes, in today’s poem and in so much of Nye’s work, I hear her asking the question: If care does not exist in the most ordinary action — a man holding his child upon his shoulder as he crosses the street on a rainy day — how can we expect it to exist anywhere else?

And, too, I hear her answering, over and over again, that such care must exist. That it has to. And that to live and to love in this world is to believe in such care’s possibility.

That testament is here, in the final lines of “Gate A-4”:

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

I know that I am thinking of this poem and of Nye’s work because of the widely shared and reported-upon Israeli attack in Rafah, an attack that killed dozens upon dozens, including many children. There are images, awful images. After the attack, in confounding, asinine statements that have now become the hallmark of empire, Israel’s government took no real accountability for the strike. According to the BBC article linked above, the IDF is reported as saying that they are “investigating the circumstances of the deaths of civilians in the area.” And an Israeli government spokesperson said: “It appears from initial reports that somehow a fire broke out, and that sadly took the lives of others."

Somehow a fire broke out. Investigating the circumstances. The deaths of civilians. Took the lives of others. All of these distancing, mystifying phrases — and these are just some of them — reveal, at their core, something so oppositional to the very idea of care. And yet, such phrases, sanitized by bureaucracy, propagated by empire, have become fundamental to our experience of tragedy — which is the norm — in everyday life. These moments of non-accountability, of walking away from the horror one ostensibly caused, are the exact opposite of Nye’s poem today. Not just the care depicted in such a poem, but also the plea that reverberates at the heart of it. The way Nye asks us to look, to consider, to care. To shoulder the child close, to listen to their heart, to steer our cars wide so as not to cause any harm.

I recently read, for the first time, Kafka’s The Castle. In it, Kafka writes:

One of the operating principles of the authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account.

He writes, too:

Just try to understand the minor official affairs concerning you; the tiniest things, which the minor official settles with a shrug, just try to understand them fully and you’ll be busy all your life and never get to the end.

In that novel, which details K.’s meandering, waylaid, strange, suffocating, and unending search for, well, someone to talk to, or, in other words, the manager of a mysterious castle looming above a town, there is never any accountability. There is only one figure after another explaining things to K. or not explaining things to K. or giving K. a job or taking a job away. There are doors and rooms and more doors and more rooms, and there are people that K. meets, and there are people that K. hears of but never meets. There is talk, so much talk. And the days pass. And, according to someone in the town, “everyone is tired here.”

Reading The Castle, I could think of no better description of the way it feels to live in the midst of empire’s various machinations — the distancing, sanitizing language of bureaucracy, the refusal of accountability, the AI-generated photos, and, while all of this is being said and shared, the rampant violence that seems to know no end other than the ultimate end — the end that ends us all. To live in the midst of all of this and to be aware of all of this is to be tired. You say you’ll stop looking for a bit. You’ll stop trying. But you still have to try. You cannot stop looking. As Nye reminds us, you have to keep holding on to whatever it is you’re holding with care. You have to keep looking. Look once. Look twice. Keep holding, and looking, and caring, and crossing this road that is too wide, wider than it should be.

I mentioned Wendell Berry earlier. In a poem, “Questionnaire” published in Reflections, he subverts the sanitizing language of bureaucracy. That poem ends with this stanza:

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill. 

Here, Berry is toying with the language of questionnaires — stale, lifeless, boring, soul-sucking. But, too, he is also asking us, just as Nye is, to look. By placing the seemingly-hyperbolic images of tragedy in the midst of the hyper-ordinary, Berry is insisting that such tragedy is not hyperbolic, that it is real. He is forcing the language-makers of empire to reckon with the reality of their violence, a violence that, though it can be obscured or distanced from, is ever-present.

People might think that this sanitizing language of non-accountability, this passive voice, this distancing from tragedy is not the same as harm. But it is harm. It is one of the most harmful aspects of the world, that we use language to steer us away from reckoning, all while we use weapons to perpetuate massive amounts of harm. Our language is one of those weapons. For every bureaucratic phrase that tells us to look away, we must use our own words to remind us to look again. And to keep looking.

Always, sadly, Auden’s lines from “Musee des Beaux Arts” ring true:

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure

This turning away from disaster. From the fall. From the cry. All because it was not an important failure.

And so I think again of Nye’s poem today. And I think again of these lines at the heart of it:

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

And I think that the difference between Nye’s poetry and the language of empire is that Nye’s poetry asks us to look closely at what we might not have paid attention to, and that empire gives us the language to look away, and to keep looking away. That language has been ongoing. It forms the basis for so much of our culture. In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu writes of the “war-will,” a government-led effort to establish support for World War I. George Creel, a supporter of Woodrow Wilson, established the Committee on Public Information, “the first institutionalized federal propaganda agency in American history” and, arguably, “the fastest-growing government bureaucracy in world history.” They had a staff of 150,000, with which they “presented a simple, black-and-white stereotype by which to understand the war, used every resource of the state to thoroughly propagate that view, and then prevented any dissenting analysis from reaching anyone with a sympathetic stereotype as to what the war was about.”

This machinery is now so deeply embedded in our culture that we have to remind ourselves, I think, to look and to question and to ask and to differ and to rage and to wonder and to look, one more time, and then to look again. And then, I think, we have to remember.

I am struck by the way the father in Nye’s poem needs no sign to remind the passersby that he is fragile. As they are. As his child. As we all are. We have to remember that. That fragility. That feeling. We have to remember what it felt like to be broken, or near broken, to be angry, to be full of care. We have to remember the weight of whatever it is we once held, and how it felt, pressed against us. Maybe the warmth, too. We have to remember the warmth. We have to remember, too, what it felt like to carry something, and how, in paying attention to the weight of it, we might have forgotten to think about our feet, and we might have stumbled, or almost stumbled. We have to remember that, because, upon seeing someone else carrying something, or someone, we will know that they might fall, and so we will be there — because we remembered what it was like — to catch them when they do.

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Some notes:

1. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.

2. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.