VOA
Palestinian-American Poet Bridges Two Cultures
Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning Palestinian-American poet who has written or edited nearly 30 books and published five collections of poems for both adults and young people.
For Nye, poetry is at once deeply spiritual and fully of this world. Today she wears a handmade bracelet sent by an admirer. It’s inscribed with a question from one of her poems: “What songs travel toward us, from far away, to deepen our days?” She describes how poetry is like a bracelet.
“I think poetry wants to wrap around us, and I think it does if we allow it to. There is a sense of being held by a poem when you read a poem you love. It’s not as if you are just appreciating it intellectually. It is as if it has wrapped itself around your spirit or your heart or your memory and it belongs to you in a much more intimate way.”
Nye was born in 1952 in Saint Louis, Missouri, after her father’s Palestinian family lost its home as a result of the1948 war which led to the creation of Israel. She says a sense of exile and longing cast a shadow over her girlhood and accounts for her lifelong devotion to social justice.
She credits her father and her American mother with teaching her about poetry’s power to comfort and awaken. She recalls a poem by Rachel Field called “Some People,” which had a profound impact upon her as a child.
Isn’t it strange some people make
You feel so tired inside,
Your thoughts begin to shrivel up
Like leaves all brown and dried!
But when you’re with some other ones,
It’s stranger still to find
Your thoughts as thick as fireflies
All shiny in your mind!
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