Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step, swept away by someone who never saw 
it was a feather.  Skin ate, walked
slept by itself, knew how to raise a 
See-you-later hand.  But skin felt 
it was never seen, never known as 
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

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Skin had hope, that's what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries
And skin remembers - silk, spiny grass
deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

- Naomi Shihab Nye