Response to "Stain" by Naomi Shihab Nye

     When I first read the poem I knew it was about her grandmother but I didn't quite understand the language in the poem and all I got was that there was some lady washing clothes and there were children running around and for some reason the woman got sad.  So, I read it again and decided the best way to get the full meaning was to dig a little deeper into the poem.  The first stanza:

"SHE SCRUBBED as hard as she could

with a stone.

Dipping the cloth, twisting the cloth.

She knew the cloth much better than most,

having stitched its vines of delicate birds."

     At first I was like so she washed clothes that maybe she had made on her own, but as a read something else came to mind when I got to the second stanza:

"The red, the blue, the purple beaks.

A tiny bird with head held high.

A second bird with fanning wings.

Her fingers felt the folded hem"

     This is when I started to think maybe the fabric she was washing was her children.  She is describing the fabric or clothes as "delicate birds" and putting metaphors to describe the fabric.  The one that caught me was "A second bird with fanning wings"  Could this be Naomi Shihab Nye's father?

     In the third stanza she mentions children and how, "She told the children, "Take care! Take care!"  Is she leaving?  Then it became clear that she died in the next verse when the author puts how old her grandmother was and how, "So many stains would never come out.  She stared at the sky, the darkening rim"  Her grandmother lived a long life and she used the laundry scenario to describe it and the darkening sky could mean that her life is ending.

     The last stanza:

"She called to the children, "Come in! Come in!"

She stood on the roof, tears on her face.

What was the thing she never gave up?

The simple love of her difficult place."

     I think it shows that she missed her family a lot, but she couldn't leave the place she lived back in Palestine.    

     I really liked this poem and even though I didn't really find the meaning in the beginning it was fun trying to put it together.  I like how she had that understanding and connection with her grandmother.  For having a grandmother that lived so far away from her its really interesting how to knew so much about her to write so many deep, loving, and caring poems about her grandmother.