Alphabet

Through figurative language and a focus on both the natural world and material objects, Shihab Nye has crafted a poem that evokes the loneliness and nihilism of loss, as well as the importance of elder voices in community. Shihab Nye’s relationship to her own heritage and family gives this poem an even more poignant feeling, and highlights the sense of grief that pervades it.

In this free-verse poem, the speaker wonders at the changes to their community brought about by the deaths of neighborhood elders. By opening with the line, “One by one” (Line 1), the speaker immediately hints at a burgeoning existential anxiety—counting down the deaths that are occurring—and begins to lay out the contrasts that define the poem, setting the tone for the poem’s emphasis on materially small yet emotionally seismic changes to the neighborhood.

Shihab Nye uses the metaphor “going up into the air” (Line 5) to describe the deaths of “the old people of our neighborhood” (Lines 2-3). Like the rest of the poem, this metaphor focuses on a physical experience of death. The lines describing the dead rising into the air acknowledge their absence while maintaining their mysticism and their special significance to the narrator. On one hand, the dead seem angelic, flying up to their heavenly home. On the other, their sudden ascension, described without wings, white light, or any other comforting details, calls to mind a stark ascent that wouldn’t be out of place in an old science fiction movie about UFO abductions. The ambiguity of the image lends this first stanza its uneasy, ominous tone.

The second stanza focuses on the image of the dead’s yards, which “still wear / small white narcissus / sweetening winter” (Lines 6-9); in this image, the yards extend the lives of their former owners. The yards are personified as “wear[ing]” (Line 7) the flowers in a way that suggests the speaker still yearns to see the departed community members, the elders having likely worn the flowers themselves in the past. Additionally, these white flowers—traditional symbols of death and loss—belong specifically to the Narcissus genus, and these flowers tend to bloom predominately in the spring. The “winter” (Line 9) that is sweetened by these flowers’ presence, therefore, must be another kind of winter: the end of the cycle of seasons of the elders’ lives.

The image of the flowers creates a loving, wistful tone that continues into the beginning of the following stanza: “[T]heir stones / glisten / under the sun” (Lines 10-12). The solid, constant natural images juxtapose that of the elders’ ephemeral lives and movement into the air, revealing life’s brevity: These plants and objects of nature, like the stones (suggesting both the stones of a garden and the stone of a grave marker) and the sun, survive, thrive, and continue on, even without human intervention, their beauty and stability contrasting the speaker’s loss.

With the word “but” (Line 13), however, the poem reaches its volta, a shift in thought or emotion. The narrator’s tone turns from wistful remembrance and leans into the worry and anxiety hinted at in the first stanza. The speaker turns their attention from the dead to the living, this time repeating “one by one” (Line 13) to emphasize that “we are losing” loved ones (Line 14), using the present progressive tense to emphasize how these losses continue still. The list of “housecoats,” “formal phrasings,” and “cupcakes” (Lines 15-17) symbolizes the small, everyday losses the community will continue to experience without their loved ones. Realizing how significant these minutiae are, the speaker panics about the future.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth stanzas use the anaphoric, or repeated, “when” (Lines 18, 20, 26, and 29) to follow the speaker’s emotional crescendo as the tone shifts to that of a more stark grieving process. The speaker describes hanging the names of the dead on a “long cord” (Line 19), as though the practice of loss has become a kind of ritual, one to which they have grown accustomed. However, the next few images juxtapose permanence and change: Few, if any, people remember what originally stood in a now “brushy spot” (Line 24); the yards are still “their” yards (Line 26), referring to the elders, but “the bare peach tree / bends a little” (Lines 27-28); and the chairs “[sit] in the same spots” (Line 30), but they are now “rusted” (Line 29). These changes to a familiar place deepen the speaker’s fear of change and of forgetfulness.

They finally confess this fear in the penultimate stanza, though they use figurative language in the form of a simile to do so:

what will be forgotten

falls over me

like the sky

over our whole neighborhood (Lines 31-34)

Though the speaker does not specify exactly “what will be forgotten” (Line 31), its comparison to “the sky / over our whole neighborhood” (Lines 33-34) suggests its vastness, as well as the speaker’s attachment to their environment: In this simile, they are the neighborhood. They go on to further describe the overwhelm and grief in the final stanza:

or the time my plane

circled high above our street

the roof of our house

dotting the tiniest

“i” (Lines 35-39)

From their perspective while flying in a plane once, the speaker could see how small their neighborhood is, and could appreciate how their environment—here symbolized by “the roof of [their] house”—transforms it from a place to a home. By comparing the roof to the dot on the letter “i,” the speaker suggests that, like this dot, the roof gives the building meaning, an identity as a home, just like a single dot transforms a simple line into one of the most important letters in the English language. One could also claim that the speaker is, themself, “the tiniest / ‘i,’” and that the knowledge of all that will be forgotten makes them realize just how small they are in the grand scheme of things. The speaker’s realization of great loss and their own anxiety about death is bookended by this final image of the plane flying high in the air, echoing the image in the first stanza of the elders “going up / into the air” (Lines 4-5), and creating a cycle that the speaker knows they will complete one day as well.