Hi everybody, are you at home?
My name is Naomi, Naomi Shihab Nye,
and I'd like to share my new
book Cast Away, Poems for
Our Times, with you.
I'm speaking from my home in San Antonio,
Texas.
I'd like to thank Matt Roeser for
this really nice cover of my book,
which looks like trash
scattered across the streets.
On the back of my book is a very tiny
poem called Nothing, and there's a mitten
in the picture that has the word
heroes stitched into the back of it.
I really found this mitten on King William
Street a few blocks from our house.
And the poem I wrote thinking
about it is this, nothing a child
ever does is trash, it is practice.
I've been interested in trash for
a long time in my life, when I was a child
the anti-littering laws took
effect in the United States.
People were told it was not a good idea
to throw your trash on the ground,
you could get in trouble for it,
you could even get a fine for it.
So I made it my hobby as I was growing
up to pick up trash in different
places where I lived or
where I walked and traveled.
It doesnt take much
equipment to pick up trash,
it's really a clean little habit,
although it sounds as if it might not be.
All you need is a glove to wear on
your pick up hand and little tongs,
which you can get somewhere
like a salad store.
And a trash bag, it could also
be a paper bag, any kind of bag.
And this equipment will
be your trash pickup kit.
Usually I like to go out, walk around
the neighborhood, see what I find,
and I always find a lot, I find too much.
But it's a great feeling
when you pick up trash,
it's like your cleaning up your place.
We can't save the world all by ourselves.
But we can pick up a little bit
of trash and make our own blocks,
or areas, or parks where we play, or
playgrounds, look a little better.
It's not hard to do, and
I urge you to think about doing
it someday when we're allowed to go out of
our houses and walk around together again.
So I'd like to read you
a few poems from Cast Away.
The first one is about a place
where there isn't any trash,
it’s walking in a forest in California.
Pine cones,
in a California redwood forest,
breath feels bigger than all people,
a note
older than our ancestors,
memories stirred by rustling.
We will survive, hold a little
beauty during difficult times.
Quiet feels round as a planet,
surely a bigger quiet holds us all.
Here is the Queen of the Pine Cones,
standing right against her own tree,
full pride.
It's fine not to know how to solve
everything, it's still a room to sit in.
And here's a little poem,
a fourth part of a poem,
about a trash walk I took with
our son when he was little.
He used to try to make a story out
of all the pieces of trash he found.
He would dump them out on the grass
when we got back and talk about
how they were connected, and then pick
them up again, and throw them away.
A boy took the bits of trash
he found on a walk and
dumped them in the yard,
arranging them as one family’s story.
First, the man lost his sandpaper.
His baby was sucking on a blue pacifier,
which is kind of like a baby's cigarette,
but the baby lost it when they crossed
the street and cried very hard.
The mom was eating a fried cherry pie,
the little girl lost her spelling
homework with dust and trust on it.
And here it is, see, too bad,
she was a good speller.
They all drop their bus
transfers in a big wind and
read this torn up newspaper
to find out what to do next.
We have no idea.
Sometimes to imagine the person who
dropped the trash you're picking up
is an interesting
community style endeavor.
It makes you feel connected
to people you may never know.
But right now when we're all stuck
in our houses, or apartments,
or rooms, here's another thing
you could do with trash.
Find some of the things you're
throwing away right now,
old papers out of your drawer,
off your desk.
I found a magazine that I was done with,
and out of it I cut
some nice pictures that I could make
greeting cards out of, or collages.
Here's a picture of a deer standing in
a field, here are some flowers in buckets,
here are some fancy
flowers like at a wedding.
Here's somebody who's very pink mouth,
here's some beautiful trees,
here's the wide horizon
of the state of Texas.
Here are some cows running, cattle with
cowboys on horses riding alongside them.
All kinds of pictures in a magazine
that could be recycled, reused.
You could come up with all the greeting
cards you need for the next year
to send to your friends and your family
while we're all under quarantine together.
Trash is an inevitable thing, that
means we all have it to some degree or
another, but how we look at it, how we
think about it, that’s what's interesting.
And what we do with it when it's our
own trash when we're staying at home.
I hope we'll all be released
from our homes soon and
be able to go on a long
trash walk together.
But have fun with it,
it's free and it's yours.
[MUSIC]
