All Things not Considered by Naomi Shihab Nye
All Things Not Considered
By Naomi Shihab Nye
You cannot stitch the breath
back into this boy.
A brother and sister were playing with toys
when their room exploded.
In what language
is this holy?
The Jewish boys killed in the cave
were skipping school, having an adventure.
Asel Asleh, Palestinian, age 17, believed in the field
beyond right and wrong where people came together
to talk. He kneeled to help someone else
stand up before he was shot.
If this is holy,
could we have some new religions please?
Mohammed al-Durra huddled against his father
in the street, terrified. The whole world saw him die.
An Arab father on crutches burying his 4 month girl weeps,
“I spit in the face of this ugly world.”
*
Most of us would take our children over land.
We would walk in the fields forever homeless
with our children,
huddle under cliffs, eat crumbs and berries,
to keep our children.
This is what we say from a distance
because we can say whatever we want.
*
No one was right.
Everyone was wrong.
What if they’d get together
and say that?
At a certain point
the flawed narrator wins.
People made mistakes for decades.
Everyone hurt in similar ways
at different times.
Some picked up guns because guns were given.
If they were holy it was okay to use guns.
Some picked up stones because they had them.
They had millions of them.
They might have picked up turnip roots
or olive pits.
Picking up things to throw and shoot:
at the same time people were studying history,
going to school.
*
The curl of a baby’s graceful ear.
The calm of a bucket
waiting for water.
Orchards of the old Arab men
who knew each tree.
Jewish and Arab women
standing silently together.
Generations of black.
Are people the only holy land?
1.) In the poem ' All Things not Considered' by Naomi Shihab Nye, the poet is talking about the injustice that the people of the Middle Eastern countries such as Palestine and Saudi Arab go through everyday of their lives. The poet talks about the suffering that the simple people have to go through because the struggle for power and control. Naomi Shihab Nye wrote this poem as she feels an emotional and familiar connection towards her homeland. Being half Palestinian herself she understands and takes it as her own personal issue that her homeland is a land torn apart by war. In the poem, the poet is exploring the dangerous environment that the men and women have to live in every single day of their lives. It also tells us about the violence that takes place in a war-ridden land and the deaths that happen to ordinary, innocent people, even children. The use of the word 'holy' in the poem is sarcastic. The poet is asking whether all this killing and suffering is necessary in the name of all that is 'holy'. All the killings and suffering that happens in the poem, from the death of a 4-month old baby that is buried by a weeping father to a 17 year old boy being shot after he helps another person, it all happens in the name of religion. There is also innocence and of how children are naive to the dangers that they face and that they could die at anytime in the lines 'A brother and sister were playing with toys when their room exploded.' and 'The Jewish boys killed in the cave were skipping school, having an adventure.'
2.) The style of the poem is narrative. It is a poem that talks about suffering, injustice and death that the people of Palestine have to go through because of two different sides, Arab and Palestine, fighting for power and control. The general tone of the poem is mocking and sarcastic.
3.) Women in Poetry
For many years, there have been many poems written by many different women. Most of these women write poetry to express their innermost feelings that they could not express by using their voices. Instead they write, so that they can channel their feelings into their poetry and that people, especially men are able to better understand the conditions that women have to go through everyday by just being daughters, faithful wives and so on. There are many women poets in the literary world such as Emily Bronte, Emily Dickensen, Sylvia Plath and Naomi Shihab Nye. The poet that has caught my eye would be Sylvia Plath. She led a life that was sad and yet through her history of depression, she was able to write her best work until today is still being read by many people and studied by students in college. The poem 'Daddy' in particular talks about her relationship with her father, Otto Plath. The poem talks about the internal war that the poet was fighting inside towards her father. She called herself a Jew and her father a Nazi to symbolise the war that she faced with her father. Critics also claim that the poem contained the ' Elektra complex' where the poet had towards her father after his death, thinking that her father was God. The poem also describes her childhood through the use of baby words and nursery rhymes, thus showing the poem through a child's perspective in language. From what i can interpret from the novel, the poet loved and at the same time hated her father as well. This may be one of the reasons for the poet's mental strain that she had suffered from in childhood to her suicide in 1963. Sylvia Plath was born on 27th October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts and died due to extreme depression on 11th February 1963 when she was only 30 years old. She was married to the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas.
Daddy- Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
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