It’s not necessarily the first section I choose to browse when visiting our local bookstore. Fiction, mysteries, and the latest award winners grab my attention before I think to wander over to check out anything to do with poetry. But that’s changing. This poetic world of words, words that paint vivid pictures in my mind and reach down to touch my heart and soul, is becoming a place I want to wander.

Naomi Shihab Nye (who was Young People’s Poet Laureate 2019-2021) crept into my life sometime during these past few years with her poems and books popping up at conferences or in conversations.   Born in St. Louis , Missouri in 1952 to an American mother and a Palestinian refugee father, Nye has lived for stretches of time in Missouri, Palestine, and now her present home, Texas. A seasoned traveller, she considers herself a “wandering poet”, and her intimate experiences of differing cultures and cultural differences help fuel her work. What also stimulates her creativity is her love for children and their deep longings, insatiable curiosity, and incredible potential.  Nye’s first poetic compositions began when she was six years old and grew bored with the assigned class readers!

Everything Comes Next is Nye’s most recent published work. This collection of both old and new free verse compositions explores themes of, as one reviewer stated, “childhood, conflict, and connectivity.”  It is in this collection that one can easily see how creatively this poet, as an Arab-American, reflects on childhood memories, the Middle East conflict, and her longing for peace and mutual respect. Much as Mary Oliver invites us with her poems to see and experience the created natural world around us differently and intimately, Nye invites us to cultivate a new set of eyes in order to really see and embrace children, daily life, and humanity.

It has been a pleasure to read and ponder these poems, aching with some of the pain, laughing along with some of the humour, pondering what it really means to value and treasure diversity within humanity.  Nye’s light touch has powerful impact on the heart.

Jerusalem

I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.

Once when my father was a boy
a stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.

Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
“I am native now.”
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child’s poem says,
“I don’t like wars,
they end up with monuments.”
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it’s ridiculous.

There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.

It’s late but everything comes next.

‘Jerusalem’ quoted from ‘Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems’
Naomi Shihad Nye
ISBN 9780063013452

Mary, Jan 2021

Poem & image posted under fair use of copyright material
in recommendation of the book ‘Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems’

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