Alphabet

Naomi Shihab Nye primarily writes free-verse poetry full of images inspired by everyday life. Her most well-known poems, “Famous” and “So Much Happiness,” remain well-loved in part for their hopeful perspective on normal life and the significance of its minutiae. “Alphabet” explores the more anxious side of this recurring theme in Shihab Nye’s work. Whereas the imagery in “So Much Happiness” portrays the inevitability of happiness, even amongst “soiled linens” and “noise and dust,” the imagery in “Alphabet” lingers on concrete objects as lingering reminders of loss. The speaker in this poem feels disconnected from the past and from broader humanity—and their smallness begins to feels ominous as they think of what the future holds. If read in the context of Shihab Nye’s writing on immigrant and child-of-immigrant identity, one might see a secondary loss present in the poem: not only the loss of knowledge of this neighborhood but also the loss of inherited traditions from older relatives with closer connections to past homes.

In the 2011 poem “Refugee Not Always,” Shihab Nye writes of her father, Aziz Shihab, who was born and raised in Jerusalem. Here, objects—in this case, stones—promise to connect the speaker’s father to home and to the past. Though he himself longs for home, the speaker—his child—wrestles with the fact that “[o]ur father / who was always our father / [was] not always our father” (Lines 2-4); in other words, their father had an entire past as a different person, a “confident schoolboy” (Line 6), before he became a refugee and a father. He spends his life searching for that sense of place:

He knew the alleyways

spoke to stones

All his life he would pick up stones

and pocket them (Lines 9-12)

Here, as in “Alphabet,” objects become talismans to the past, to memories no longer accessible. This motif connects many works in Shihab Nye’s prolific career.