"Kindness" by Naomi Shihab nye

Kindness   

           Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.


Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
 purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Analysis/Reasoning:

I chose this piece for my anthology because of multiple reasons. First is because students could relate it to what the pioneers went through before making it to the Salt Lake valley and having to leave everything behind. Second, it is a piece written by someone who has seen what it would be like to move around and lose things as well as receive kindness in different ways. Lastly I want my students to understand how important it is to be kind to each other and to accept each others differences. I want students to think of all the things pioneers lost or left behind before coming to Utah, as well as many other immigrants. I want students to then list all the things that those same people/groups gained or had kindness shown to them on their way to Utah, and once they arrived.

Common Core Standards:
 One of the overall standards that students are supposed to learn/observe through out the class is a well lived life. This story helps students begin to evaluate how they are living their life.

Social Studies standards: 
      Standard 1: Students will understand the relationship between the physical geography in Utah and human life.
      -Objective 3: Analyze how human actions modify the physical environment.

Reading: 
craft and structure- standard 4: determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology.
         Standard 5: explain major differences  between poems, drama, and prose, and refer to the structural elements of poems and drama when writing or speaking about a text.

integration of knowledge and ideas- 
        Standard 9: compare and contrast the treatment of similar themes and topics and patterns of events in stories, myths, and traditional literature from different cultures.


More about the author:
 poetry foundation
Wikipedia 
What inspires her poetry