Celebrating Women's History Month by celebrating the GREAT Palestinian-American POET Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye http://www.wingspress.com/author.cfm/91/Naomi-Shihab-Nye/

poets.org.... Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Jordan, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her B.A. in English and world religions from Trinity University.

Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East, Fuel (1998), Red Suitcase (1994), and Hugging the Jukebox (1982).

Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, "her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life."

Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall Prize, the International Poetry Forum, as well as four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Wittner Bynner Fellow. In 1988 she received The Academy of American Poets' Lavan Award, selected by W. S. Merwin.

Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts.

She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/174

Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye

Blood

Famous

Fuel

Making a Fist

Negotiations with a Volcano

San Antonio

Snow

Streets

The Man Whose Voice Has Been Taken From His Throat

The Words Under the Words

Two Countries

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178324

& more POEMS

Blood

Boy and Egg

Burning the Old Year

Different Ways to Pray

During a War

Famous

Fundamentalism

Hello

Hugging the Jukebox

Last August Hours Before the Year 2000

My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop

Supple Cord

The Small Vases from Hebron

The Story, Around the Corner

The Turtle Shrine Near Chittagong

The Words Under the Words

Truth Serum

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change

Yellow Glove

The Small Vases from Hebron

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Tip their mouths open to the sky.

Turquoise, amber,

the deep green with fluted handle,

pitcher the size of two thumbs,

tiny lip and graceful waist.

Here we place the smallest flower

which could have lived invisibly

in loose soil beside the road,

sprig of succulent rosemary,

bowing mint.

They grow deeper in the center of the table.

Here we entrust the small life,

thread, fragment, breath.

And it bends. It waits all day.

As the bread cools and the children

open their gray copybooks

to shape the letter that looks like

a chimney rising out of a house.

And what do the headlines say?

Nothing of the smaller petal

perfectly arranged inside the larger petal

or the way tinted glass filters light.

Men and boys, praying when they died,

fall out of their skins.

The whole alphabet of living,

heads and tails of words,

sentences, the way they said,

“Ya’Allah!” when astonished,

or “ya’ani” for “I mean”—

a crushed glass under the feet

still shines.

But the child of Hebron sleeps

with the thud of her brothers falling

Naomi Shihab Nye, “The Small Vases from Hebron” from Fuel. Copyright © 1998 by Naomi Shihab Nye
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178324

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