Vox Populi
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Naomi Shihab Nye: Everything in Our World Did Not Seem to Fit
Once they started invading us.
Taking our houses and trees, drawing lines,
pushing us into tiny places.
It wasn’t a bargain or deal or even a real war.
To this day they pretend it was.
But it was something else.
We were sorry what happened to them but
we had nothing to do with it.
You don’t think what a little plot of land means
till someone takes it and you can’t go back.
Your feet still want to walk there.
Now you are drifting worse
than homeless dust, very lost feeling.
I cried even to think of our hallway,
cool stone passage inside the door.
Nothing would fit for years.
They came with guns, uniforms, declarations.
LIFE magazine said,
“It was surprising to find some Arabs still in their houses.”
Surprising? Where else would we be?
Up in the hillsides?
Conversing with mint and sheep, digging in dirt?
Why was someone else’s need for a home
greater than our own need for our own homes
we were already living in? No one has ever been able
to explain this sufficiently. But they find
a lot of other things to talk about.
Naomi Shihab Nye, author of more than 30 volumes, is a poet, novelist and songwriter born in 1952 to a Palestinian father, Aziz Shihab, who worked as a journalist, editor and writer, and American mother, Miriam Allwardt Shihab, an artist who worked as a Montessori school teacher. Her father grew up in Palestine. He and his family became refugees in the 1948 Nakba, when the state of Israel was created. She has said her father “seemed a little shell-shocked when I was a child.”
Copyright © 2019 by Naomi Shihab Nye. All rights reserved. Included in Vox Populi by permission of Naomi Shihab Nye.
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How true and how beautifully expressed. I love the lines, “We were sorry what happened to them, but/we had nothing to do with it.”
Meanwhile the genocide continues and we watch, we watch
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Exactly. Thank you, Mandy.
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Similar too to South Africa during Apartheid
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Yes, it is.
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Powerful poem.
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Oh my, yes.
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Shared. Heartbreaking.
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It really is heartbreaking. so much tragedy has been visited on the Palestinian people in the last 80 years.
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There are no explanations, no rationalizations, no words left to speak of the cruelty. Yes, the cruelty of Israel in these days of horrors .The land grab. The power grab. and there will be no end until Palestine is recognized by the rest of the world and freed for itself. And when will that be? When the idea of “holy land” is not a thing to be owned, … not a place to be occupied, but a land to be honored under one sky, fit for humans to live in and children to survive. .
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Yes, we are watching in real time a genocidal war against the Palestinians…
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A strong poem with a strong voice.
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Indeed.
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Never walk past a Naomi Shihab Nye poem. Never.
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Yep. I never do.
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How true…
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a refugee in your own land, an orphan in the rubble of what used to be your family’s doorway
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Exactly. A good description of native peoples replaced by settler colonialists around the world.
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Of course this is fabulous and of course our hearts are broken and souls deeply disturbed. You’d have to be a native American to comprehend this terrible hisfory.
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Yes, the similarities to the situation of Native Americans is shocking.
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I thought the same things when I read the poem…
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