NYE Note

My Father and the Fig Tree
 For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He'd point at the cherry trees and say,
 "See those? I wish they were figs."
In the evening he sat by my bed
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
 Even when it didn't fit, he'd stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
 Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
"That's not what I'm talking about! he said,
"I'm talking about a fig straight from the earth –
gift of Allah! -- on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I'm talking about picking the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth."
(Here he'd stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
 We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
"Plant one!" my mother said.
 But my father never did.
 He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
"What a dreamer he is. Look how many things
he starts and doesn't finish."

The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I'd never heard. "What's that?"
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
"It's a figtree song!" he said,
 plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
 emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.

 -Naomi Shihab Nye

 from 19 VARIETIES OF GAZELLE


* Joha - A trickster figure in Palestinian folktales

I see how are fig trees luring her dad, in my opinion, but it shows the status of fig trees in their cultures. Her dad tied camel to fig tree. Also, he used fabulous language to depict fig trees - " Straight from the Earth, gift of Allah!". I can see the fig tree is a belief in their culture. He also used "largest, fattest, and sweetest to describe them for the people who never have them before. Mother and father appear in different stanzas and a different time, which reminds readers how complete is her family and how important is the fig tree in her life. In the end of the third stanza, it has a clue for the fourth stanza where her father finds the largest fig tree. Along with the happiness and song, she introduces her family and fig trees to readers.

Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow

when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel

of singleness, feather lost from the tail

of a bird, swirling onto a step,

swept away by someone who never saw

it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,

slept by itself, knew how to raise a 

see-you-later hand. But skin felt

it was never seen, never known as

a land on the map, nose like a city,

hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque

and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.

Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.

Love means you breathe in two countries.

And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass,

deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.

Even now, when skin is not alone,

it remembers being alone and thanks something larger

that there are travelers, that people go places

larger than themselves.

Skin is what memories and customs left on a person. When we live in a totally new environment, feathers grow on our body to protect us, to help us to adapt to the new enviornment. Under the feather, the trait of the skin is hard to be identified. 

Skin is the power inside. It heals you and makes you stronger. Silk and spiny grass may refer to the scene in her childhood memory. People always hide their past, and the skin still remembers it. When we go to new places, our home like the skin reminds us to think where are we built.