The Passport Photo
By Naomi Shihab Nye
“The Passport Office welcomes photographs which depict the
applicant as relaxed and smiling.”
Passport Application
Before they shoot, I think of where I am going,
Chile, the world’s thinnest country,
the bright woven hats on the Indians of Peru.
I swallow the map of South America tacked to my kitchen door,
the swarm of strange names, blue rivers
like veins in an old woman’s leg.
A continent I know little about, except what I have read
or my Bolivian neighbor’s tales. “A School of Thieves,”
she tells me. “I’d stay home if I were you.”
Trapped in front of the hot lights,
I try to forget distances,
how far I will be from the ones who loved me longest.
I do not think anything familiar or cozy.
I think coastlines, jagged edges, roads ahead of me
cracking open like coconuts, and then I smile
Because this face you are snapping
is a map to another continent
I have barely begun to learn.