Poet, novelist, editor, and political activist Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952) is the daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother. Nye grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. Her works for children include the picture book Sitti’s Secret (1994) and the novel Habibi (1996). Her poetry collections include Different Ways to Pray (1980), 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), and Transfer (2011). She has won many awards and fellowships, including four Pushcart Prizes (for best work from small presses), the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, and the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Nye, who has been a visiting writer all over the world, describes herself as “a wandering poet.”

Arabic Coffee

“Arabic Coffee” was first published in 1986 as an illustrated pamphlet-style broadside.

It was never too strong for us:

make it blacker, Papa,

thick in the bottom,

tell again how years will gather

5

in small white cups,

how luck lives in a spot of grounds.

Leaning over the stove, he let it

boil to the top, and down again.

Two times. No sugar in his pot.

10

And the place where men and women

break off from one another

was not present in that room.

The hundred disappointments,

fire swallowing olive-wood beads

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at the warehouse, and the dreams

tucked like pocket handkerchiefs

into each day, took their places

on the table, near the half-empty

dish of corn. And none was

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more important than the others,

and all were guests. When

he carried the tray into the room,

high and balanced in his hands,

it was an offering to all of them,

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stay, be seated, follow the talk

wherever it goes. The coffee was

the center of the flower.

Like clothes on a line saying

You will live long enough to wear me,

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a motion of faith. There is this,

and there is more.

(1986)