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.