Category Archives: Favorite Poem

I love the joy in this poem.  I admire the precision of Naomi’s word choice and her excellent instructions for allowing happiness to be.

Jean Emerson
Santa Clara County and Sr. Citizen
-therefore exempt from disclosing my age.

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of dust and noise
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Naomi Shihab Nye

My favorite poem is my guide; it helps me cope with the death of a best friend. Pablo Neruda’s “A Dog Has Died” shows me that I can mourn and celebrate the life and death of my dog Bud. But also, that I must learn to accept his death, and move on.

Justine Fajardo, 23
Student, San Jose

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I’ll join him right there,
but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he’d keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing. Continue reading →

In my youth before I wore goggles (that’s what I used to call glasses), everything I saw looked like it had been hit by various bugs and smeared with windshield wipers. But, I never thought my vision was bad. Then I began wearing goggles of my own and my vision suddenly became a newly discovered treasure. When I read Milton, I realized that though I wore glasses, I had brilliant, fortunate light to spend, and that I did indeed need to treasure it. So my vision entailed a mission; I had to be worthy of my sight, because hell, Milton was blind and he still wrote great stuff.

This poem for me categorizes the nature of “unconventional”–unconventional anything, really, but here, more specifically, relationships that somehow scare you but promise you the keys to the kingdom in one breath.  The imagery of October and witch dreams gets me every time. Are we ever ready to meet our fate?

Sherri Harvey
Lecturer, San Jose State University and Foothill College
San Jose

Wild Wind, Green Tea

Your birthday. A dark night of wild wind and goblin clouds.
The moon rocks in starry rafters, yellow lanterns sizzle on the
terrace, which you’ve opened to the sky. You are delighted
with all this mad weather, with the witch dreams of October.
Cold sheets, cold kisses, nightgowns dancing by themselves:
this is what a good soul conjures with wicked wishes, why
the world won’t harm you, why it is yours. Why instead of
cake, there are little dishes of green tea ice cream, civilized
and pure. Yet also full of secrets, strange and tasty. You hold
out the spoon and say, One bite and you are mine forever.
And because I believe you, I refuse that first mouthful,
waiting to gobble it all later, when I am ready to meet my fate.

Eleanor Lerman