The Mother Writes to the Murderer: A Letter<\/b>
\nby Naomi Shihab Nye<\/i> <\/p>\n
To you whose brain is a blunt fist
\npushed deep inside your skull
\nwhose eyes are empty bullets
\nwhose mouth is a stone more speechless
\nthan lost stones at the bottoms of rivers
\nwho lives in a shrunken world where nothing blooms
\nand no promise is ever kept <\/p>\n
To you whose face I never saw but now see
\neverywhere the rest of my life <\/p>\n
You don’t know where she hid her buttons <\/p>\n
arranged in families by color or size
\ntissue-wrapped in an oatmeal box
\nhow she told them goodnight sleep well
\nand never felt ashamed <\/p>\n
You don’t know her favorite word
\nand I won’t tell you <\/p>\n
You don’t have her drawings taped to your refrigerator
\nblue circuses, red farms
\nYou don’t know she cried once in a field of cows
\nsaying they were too beautiful to eat <\/p>\n
I’m sure you never thought of that
\nI’m sure nothing is too beautiful for you to eat <\/p>\n
You have no idea what our last words were to one another
\nhow terribly casual
\nbecause I thought she was going a block away
\nwith her brother to the store
\nThey would be back in ten minutes <\/p>\n
I was ironing her dress
\nwhile two houses away an impossible darkness
\nrose up around my little girl <\/p>\n
What can I wish you in return?
\nI was thinking knives and pistols
\nhigh voltages searing off your nerves
\nI was wishing you could lose your own life
\nbit by bit finger by toe
\nand know what my house is like <\/p>\n
how many doors I still will have to open <\/p>\n
Maybe worse would be for you to love something
\nand have it snatched up sifted out of your sight
\nfor what reason?
\na flurry of angels recalled to heaven
\nand then see how you sit
\nand move and remember
\nhow you sleep at night
\nhow you feel about mail my letter to you
\nall the letters passing through all the hands
\nof the people on earth
\nwhen the only one that matters
\nis the one you can neither receive
\nnor send<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Mother Writes to the Murderer: A Letter by Naomi Shihab Nye To you whose brain is a blunt fist pushed deep inside your skull whose eyes are empty bullets whose mouth is a stone more speechless than lost stones at the bottoms of rivers who lives in a shrunken world where nothing blooms and … Continue reading “yesterday I danced in the rain”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[138,287,128],"class_list":["post-3656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-death","tag-misery","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}