“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye is the most popular contemporary poem of 2018, with more than 250,000 individuals viewing the poem online in the past 12 months on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org.
“In a time in our society that feels too frequently unkind, I am very touched that people feel this poem speaks to them,” said Nye, an author who lives in San Antonio, Texas. “It is a reminder that no one is a stranger in this world. I have never felt I ‘wrote’ the poem. I have always felt that it was given to me when I needed it, after we were robbed on a night bus in Colombia, and someone else on that bus, the Indian man mentioned in the poem, was murdered.”
‘Kindness’
By Naomi Shihab Nye
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.
