Two Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye

Dear Bobcats

We gather together now as true family instead of regular family
because we are far flung brave creatures and these are wild days.
I know people don’t see us very often.
We will not curl on your feet to sleep but
will accompany all your dreams.
Even if you see only one of us
in your whole lifetime.
Like the foxes, or single sleek coyote you witnessed
running up a major thoroughfare in your city,
then blink! Gone. We, the armadillos and snakes,
in the Year of the Snake, will be recognized.
We root and rumble, curl in a hollow.
We find our quiet ways.
Our numbers shrink, but we don’t do math.
We persist. You too must live like this.

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Email Gift from Israeli Poet

          For Naomi from Naomi

People in Israel are reading the names
of dead children and babies.
Speaking them slowly, each syllable a tuft of hair.
Pronouncing ages in holy succession.
Eight months, seven years. Hebrew speaker
shaping Arabic rolled from the throat,
rich with respect. Why can’t this be
our only way? Two years, eleven months.
Hendia Janan Bilal. Rafik Mahmoud Darwish Abdullah.
Blanket wrapped bodies, crushed,
mutilated, torn. The perfect ear ripped
from the perfect head. What did the mothers do next?

Catholic ex-president on beach
staring east. May he imagine you every day.
May you be the wind ruffling him.
Don’t stop. He didn’t stop. Onward.
His own dead daughter had my same name,
same as the Israeli poet who sent this video.
His granddaughter, recently a mother, too. Our name is
HUMAN (Holy Mary Mother of God).
The video lasts eleven hours plus.

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Naomi Shihab Nye’s most recent books are Grace Notes – Poems About Families, Everything Comes Next, and The Tiny Journalist. She is a Palestinian-American writer on faculty at Texas State University.