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Welcome to our OpenLinkNight folks! This is your opportunity to link 1 poem of your choice as this is no prompt-day. For those who missed the Mr Linky deadline the past week or this Tuesday’s poetics about “postcard poem”, this is also your opportunity to share your poem. I also want to remind you that our Haibun Monday is still open the whole week.

I would like to share a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye with her poem “Kindness,” found in Words Under Words: Selected Poems.

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.

To join us for Thursday’s OpenLinkNight, which happens every other week, here’s how to join:

  • Write a poem in your blog.
  • Enter a link directly to your 1 poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below
  • There you will find links to other poets, and more will join during the next 48 hours
  • Read and comment on other poet’s work, we all go here to have our poems read
  • Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.
  • Comment and participate in our discussion below, if you like.   We are a friendly bunch of poets.
  • Have fun.

See you at the poetry trail. ~Grace~