19 Varieties of Gazelle...another Nye poem

Stain
By Naomi Shihab Nye

She scrubbed as hard as she could with a stone.
Dipping the cloth, twisting the cloth.
She knew the cloth much better than most,
having stitched its vines of delicate birds.

The red, the blue, the purple beaks.
A tiny bird with head held high.
A second bird with fanning wings.
Her fingers felt the folded hem.

The water in her pan was cool.
She stood outside by the lemon tree.
Children chattered around her there.
She told the children, “Take care! Take care!”

What would she think of the world today?
She died when she was one hundred and six.
So many stains would never come out.
She stared at the sky, the darkening rim.

She called out to the children, “Come in! Come in!”
She stood on the roof, tears on her face.
What was the thing she never gave up?
The simple love of her difficult place.

The second poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that I chose was Stain. I reread this poem only a few times before I felt that I grasped what Nye was trying to say, compared to some of her other poems where the meaning is hidden deeper in the poem. The main character in the poem is a woman, although Nye does not give her a name. Nye seems to follow this pattern of using pronouns as characters, possibly so her audience can relate and interpret her poem in many different ways, like in the poem Two Countries where she uses “skin” as a character. This poem is telling a story about a woman washing “stained” clothes outside. The five stanzas go in sequence order of how this woman washes, how she scrubs, twists, and rinses the clothes. The woman tells her children to “take care” when they leave to play and “come in” once the day is done. From first glance at the first few stanzas, it seems that this poem is simplistic and the story is purely about a woman delicately washing stained clothes, but the last two stanzas take the poem to a deeper level. They talk about the stains as never coming out, but what if she wasn’t talking about the stains coming out of the clothes but more of her past? I liked how Nye put a few questions in her poem such as, “What would she think of the world today? What was the thing she never gave up?” As the reader, this leaves you in suspense while also giving you something to think of as you reread and analyze this character. As the character is standing on the roof, it seems as though she is looking out on the stains on her life and what she failed to get out. The last line even says, “the simple love of her difficult place” so maybe her personal stain was never getting out of her country. These are just a few things to think about as you, too, read this poem.