Naomi Shihab Nye in Geneen Roth

Kindness

I think kass introduced me to this poem? Anyway, last night I started reading Geneen Roth's Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations about Food and Money. It opens with Roth and other friends finding out that they've been swindled out of their savings by Madoff.

After hanging up the phone, I still couldn't move. I felt as if a bomb had crashed through my chest and left me in pieces, but my body was still intact. A hummingbird whizzed by. Then I thought of a poem that I'd once read by Naomi Shihab Nye called "Kindness." I couldn't recall any of the lines, but I remembered the word sorrow, and I remembered something about losing what you saved and that kindness was prominent, was, in this poem, the outcome of devastation.

Kindness.

I said the word to the stove, the walls, the refrigerator. The sound it made, the feeling of it in my mouth, made me want to cry.

Suddenly, I didn't want to do anything but read that poem.

... The doorbell rang. Kim.

She was standing there, in black velvet shirt and jeans, looking dazed and grief-stricken. The first thing she said was, "I need to find that 'Kindness' poem. Do you have it?"