Everything in Our World Did Not Seem to Fit

Naomi Shihab Nye

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 butwe had nothing to do with it.You don't think what a little plot of land meanstill someone takes it and you can't go back.Your feet still want to walk there.Now you are drifting worsethan 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 on the hillsides?Conversing with mint and sheep, digging in dirt?Why was someone else's need for a homegreater than our own need for our own homeswe were already living in? No one has ever been ableto explain this sufficiently. But they finda lot of other things to talk about.

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Photo:
Malcolm Greenaway

Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American resident of Texas, was born in St. Louis and lived in Jerusalem in her youth. She has written or edited more than 30 books of poetry and prose for young readers and adults, including Habibi, Sitti’s Secrets, 19 Varieties of Gazelle, and The Turtle of Oman.

Ripon, North Yorkshire
England

A Blade of Grass brings together, in English and in Arabic, new work by poets from the Occupied West Bank and Gaza, from the Palestinian diaspora and from within the disputed borders of Israel. Featuring work by Fady Joudah, Mahmoud Darwish, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Deema K. Shehabi, Ashraf Fayadh, Mustafa Abu Sneineh, Naomi Shihab Nye, Marwan Makhoul, Farid Bitar, Fatena Al Ghorra, Dareen Tatour, and Sara Saleh, it celebrates the flourishing cultural resistance of the Palestinian people to decades of displacement, occupation, exile, and bombardment. Voices fresh and seasoned converse with history, sing to the land, and courageously nurture an attachment to human fragility. Written in free verse and innovative forms, hip-hop rhythms, and the Arabic lyric tradition, these poems bear witness both to catastrophe and to the powerful determination to survive it.

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