Smaller than a Mouse- a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye published in her most recent book "Sidekick" 2026

                   Smaller than a Mouse

We demonstrated on a steaming day,

carrying signs,

five hundred thousand people 

in the streets of New York

saying no to war,

gathering crowds for blocks and miles,

crush and press of world's religions

and secular codes, multi-flavored

WE SHALL NOT KILL

and the next day our story,

the story of saying no to war,

was written up in a three-sentence news item

on the back of the front section of the New York Times

smaller than the story of a mouse found

in a chain restaurant soup.

This is the truth.
 

    Poem by award winning Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye published in her most recent book "Sidekick" 2026  

 https://boaeditions.org/book/sidekick/

Praise for Naomi Shihab Nye

“On every page, Shihab Nye's insistent call is the same: people, all people, deserve to live safe and healthy lives, free from fear and violence. She mourns, rages, takes politicians to task, but always lands on the side of compassion.” —Shelf Awareness

 

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes including six collections of poetry from BOA Editions: Sidekick (2026), Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You & Yours (2005), Transfer (2011), and The Tiny Journalist (2019). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow. Her numerous awards include a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Patterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize the Betty Prize from Poets House for her service to poetry, and the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. She served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2010–2015, and in May 2019 she was named the 2019–2021 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. 

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]