The Wounded Poet

Jim Benton

February 3, 2022

for Naomi Shihab Nye

Beside the ancient city gate

back against its adobe wall, the poet

regards sore-footed travelers passing

in caravan and convoy and cavalcade.

Wrapped in hand-woven clothes, she watches

and weaves from threads of sorrow and loss,

from unraveled remnants of lives asunder

and wounded strands of common paths,

her garments edged with compassion.

She is at home in the dusty darkness

of refugees, migrants lost and wandering,

shuffling men and overlooked women,

and children with sticky hands spilling outside the edges

of maps and nations and borders and walls.

The garments she weaves are the songs of their lives;

their broken melodies are hers as well.

For who can hear the sufferer’s song

and not have wounds of her own?

She sings with the power of days and wraps them

one by one in serapes and shawls,

burqas and bandages, caftans, cloaks,

and sheltering woolen blankets.

She sings of pulleys and buttonholes,

and weeds that spring from sidewalk cracks.

Her children notice and reshape their world: 

shoelaces, snow bullets, socks turned inside out.

And never forget their own power.

One by one, she weaves her garments,

sometimes unraveling, starting again.

Day by day, she gives them away

as freely as she returns a smile,

clasps a hand, or sees what others do not.

By moonlight, she gathers fallen strands,

discarded tales, forgotten dreams,

from the hard-packed trails,

fills her jug with water from the roadside

well, and sometimes wrestles

angels for a blessing or a song.

At times she sings far away from home,

an ember all wrapped in adobe and warming

all who gather near. She sings

with the power of children and days,

wearing a garment woven of life,

and beckons us all to weave together

a song of love for all the earth.

Jim Benton is a retired high school teacher whose best career moments were teaching students to see and write poetry. In retirement, he has given more time to his own writing and has published twenty-odd poems over the last decade or so. He lives in Denton, TX.