Naomi Shihab Nye

Poet, novelist, editor, and political activist Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952) is the daughter of a Palestinian father and American mother. Nye grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, visited Jerusalem for the first time when she was fourteen, 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.” An advocate for peaceful solutions to conflict, she often writes about miscommunications caused by disregarding or misusing language, as in the following poem from her collection You and Yours (2005).

There is no stray bullet, sirs.

No bullet like a worried cat

crouching under a bush,

no half-hairless puppy bullet

dodging midnight streets.5

The bullet could not be a pecan

plunking the tin roof,

not hardly, no fluff of pollen

on October’s breath,

no humble pebble at our feet.10

So don’t gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,

tasks abandoned midstream.

Our fickle hearts are fat

with stray devotions, we feel at home15

among bits and pieces,

all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not

wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise

by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend20

of life, should not be granted immunity

by soft saying—friendly fire, straying death-eye,

why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.

This bullet had no secret happy hopes,25

it was not singing to itself with eyes closed

under the bridge.