Change it change
Apologizing to our own story handful of soil
I could have planted something better here
To walk without remembering another walk
To wash off the hope of a darkened day
Make a new one
This is normal here, the fathers say
bombs exploding
tourists stepping carefully over grenades
Excuse us this is not the life
we would have made or the way
we would have welcomed you
tear gas billowing over our streets
Regular
Usual
SOS
We are so tired
Salvation
Sitti’s hands fingering red and purple velvets,
soothed by nap, by softness, pulling yellow and orange floss
snugly through, till a calm bird rises from the stitches,
with a neat knotted eye
in such hard days.
The Old Journalist Talks to Janna
From beyond the trees
I appreciate your efforts.
I see you stand, hands up, saying
Move back! to the ones with guns.
This was never easy for me to do.
After seeing them kill my friend,
I feared them. I loved my life,
did not want my mother to grieve.
You are braver than I was.
His blood spilled over the bench
where we had been sitting.
It’s hard to describe how dust settles
but we all know it does.
How the bird returns to the nest
with no apology, the brother disappears
for decades, then says, I was never mad
at anyone, I was just hurt.
Words circulate like breezes in the evening
after a long hot day. I want to say,
Take care of yourself. We need you.
It is possible we have to be losers, dear Janna.
In the big picture who cares who won or lost?
I always thought about dignity, grace, truth.
I thought about enduring. Maybe losers
get to be taken care of!
The truth is we were so wronged and so forgotten
we had to become heroes to survive at all.
You speak the bell ringing, the wake up call,
and I am sending you the last scraps of energy
I had in my pockets when I died.
Grandfathers Say
Grandfathers say the garden is deep,
old roots twisted beyond our worry
or reach. Maybe our grief began there,
in the long history of human suffering,
where rain goes when it soaks out of sight.
Savory smoke from ancient fires
still lingers. At night you can smell it
in the stones of the walls.
When you awaken, voices
from inside your pillow
still holding you close.
The Old Journalist Writes …
From a notebook of Aziz Shihab
I heard my mother die.
After days of utter silence, she opened her dry toothless mouth and said,
“Aziz, let me kiss your hand. Take me on the road. Be with me on the road.”
“What road?”
“It’s a narrow road. The lights are strong. Green doves are flying overhead.”
She said people were waiting for her on both sides of the road.
“Who are they?”
Her sister Masooda, her son, her sister Nafa, her daughter Naomi.
“But they are dead,” I said.
“No, here they are,” she said. “They are smiling.”
She opened her eyes wider.
“Do you see them?” I asked.
“I don’t see you, but I see them.” She shrieked, “Stop staring at me!”
“But I’m not staring at you,” I said.
“Not you. That man is staring at me, making fun of me. Go away, don’t
stare at me,” she said again.
“Who is he?”
“A very tall man. He’s pestering the little girl.”
“What girl?”
“I don’t know. But she is right here, sleeping next to me.”
Long silence.
“Aziz, my son,” she suddenly said. “Look at the grapevines.
They are loaded with sweet grapes.”
“Where?”
“Right here,” she said and smiled, looking up at the ceiling. “Right here.”
“Hanging from the ceiling?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, Masada!” she shouted. “Stay with me!”
“Were you friends with Masada before she died?”
“She didn’t die. Here she is. Say hello to your Aunt Masada.”
Two women came to the door of her room to visit her.
I invited them in, but she said, “No, I don’t want them! They
are not from my world.”
Silence. Long silence. I apologized to the women, escorted them out.
Then she fell asleep, mumbling to the little girl she said was beside her.
When she awakened she whispered, “Aziz, where are you?”
I told her I was next to her. I gently rubbed her forehead. She fell asleep again.
In less than five minutes, she awakened. “Take me home, I beg you, take me home!”
I told her she was home.
“Not this home! The one outside the gates. Right over the little shop.”
I said I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Why not, son? What’s wrong with you? My home outside the gate. I beg you take me home.”
I told her she was a little confused.
“Oh no, I never was confused. You are. Take me home.”
“Where are you now?”
“Out in the fields on the ground.”
“How do you want me to take you home?”
“I’m in the water tank. I am sitting in it. Just push it.”
“Does it have wheels?”
“Yes, and it is empty. Except for me.”
*
She lived one more year after this.
Friend
We walked through weeds.
Two bottles pitched outside his house, boarded,
UNSAFE notice tacked to the door.
He tied an engine to a trashcan, told me to drive it.
I did not.
You made us act in all your plays.
I did? Who wrote the plays?
You did.
Faded curtain costumes, clink of nickels in a hat.
We’re the old gang, we said to people staring.
This was our ’hood.
You’re old all right, and it ain’t no more!
Did you plant these huge leafdroppin’ trees?
We curse you!
Good job, I said to my invisible
tree-planting grandpa, walking away.
Castles, fortresses, cabins.
We took note of broken twigs.
We dreamed a bear, ancient animal
come to befriend. We never fought,
could not imagine wars.
No one ever built anything lasting in the woods
so the ditch remembered us best.
Happy Birthday
Older than old people now.
Older than the auntie in the bank,
I just come in here so someone
will say Good Morning to me. Older than
the shiny-headed Englishman
at the end of the table describing his journeys
so long ago, seriously he seems like Grandpa
and you are older than he.
Paint-peeling flowerpot tipping in the grass,
faded sign for EATS, birdseed store,
they have seeds for birds you never heard of
and will scoop it i
nto brown paper sacks to weigh
on an old-fashioned scale. Older than the scale?
Down the street everything is changing.
Abandoned factories turning to lofts.
Junior’s Bar to a dental clinic.
No one cares for your opinion,
you are a rusted spike in a railroad track,
bundle of rotting leaves under the climbing rose.
Turn them under, over, be brave enough
to disappear as you promised you would
when you were young and clumsy
and strong as a roof.
Stay Afloat
What scraps we cling to these days—
giant slim stalk springing from the aloe pot,
upside-down pale orange bells
lasting for months.
Gift from the underworld.
Or Fareed Zakaria
resembling my father when I was young.
Gazing into the screen, please tell me
what is going on. Who are these strange people
we live among?
There are no olive trees or mint leaves
in their forest,
only looming bank vaults with locked drawers.
How much do they need?
Someone else will launch a bomb.
Children wake up smiling, to see their mothers killed.
How do they survive?
When I see the politicians’ faces
gazing stupidly with thin smiles
as if posing
for a shaving cream ad,
I lose my mind.
Find a child to be your leader now.
Follow him through rooms, notice
his delicate moves, delight in syllables, repeat.
Announcing the swish of every passing bus.
Bow down to his love.
Babies say, Mine, mine, but babies are kind.
The men on the screen, jaws tight,
can’t remember a single right thing to do.
To Sam Maloof’s Armchair
Sam, what if we could sit in your chair an entire day,
feel its gleaming grace pervade our skin and thoughts,
would we be changed? Your walnut found a sheen
deeper than memories of women and men. You used
hand tools, liked “clean flow.” When you dove
wholeheartedly into the slowness of labor’s long elegance,
perfection grew. But you called yourself a “woodworker”
because it was an “honest word.” The boy Sam spoke
Spanish and Arabic before English, lived among
California fruit trees, knew eight brothers and sisters.
People say you had elegant script, were always generous,
would describe to anyone how you did what you did.
A craftsman of “soul,” shaping low-slung arms a sitter
might fling legs over, still feeling comfortable, calm.
Even your hinges were wood. No dazzle, no frills,
you kept shaping tables, shelves, this honorable chair
we could vote for repeatedly, timeless presence dissolving
gloom. We close our eyes, try to live in your room.
Unforgettable
In the water is a poem
unwritten by grass.
No. In the land is a poem
unwritten by water.
Everything unwritten.
Not on your forehead,
not on the sky.
The fathers sailed away
planning to return.
Not easily will they forget
a place that let us all
sorrow this much.
Rumor Mill
I heard that far away in other countries,
Finland and China, ancient Palestinian men and women
fall asleep with their hands on their hearts and by now
their hearts are shaped just like old Palestine,
not the new cut-into-bits pockmarked map of places
we are allowed to live, but the whole stitchery of towns
with melodious names, Arimathea, Bethabara,
Cana, Tiberias, Nazareth, Beersheba, Magdala,
and when these people dream, their rooms fill
with the flute music our great grandfathers loved,
the ney, that you used to hear around fires
at dusk, rising notes in thin curls of smoke.
Goat cheeses leavened and clarified,
small white mountains on an old black tarp.
No one had to do anything right then
after dreaming like that, it is easier for them
to go on living.
Patience Conversations
Why don’t they write about us more?
Our beauty overwhelms them.
Why can’t they hear our worlds echoing back and forth?
Song with doubled harmony. Ears closed.
Who wanted what?
We all love falafel.
Calling us anti-Semitic
when we are Semites too,
no joke, no one is laughing.
Why don’t they ask the right questions?
What’s hard for you? That’s hard for me too.
Why do they stare at us as if they never saw kids before?
Where are their memories?
Have they placed their memories in iron lock boxes
buried in the cement of the drainage ditch?
Do they see the kids who have to walk to school
through the drainage ditch?
Because they won’t let them cross the road?
Tell my story, tell my story.
Memory was always staring hard at itself
inside my head.
Does the wide world know there are two roads,
one for them and one for us? And ours isn’t good?
The wide world! Singing of the stable and the cows.
Donkey and kings. Wise men.
We would be so happy to meet.
Pothole, crack. Pothole, crack.
Where were the wise women?
Children circling, chanting in the shadow of the wall.
Small boy carrying broken candle
he found on the ground. Not even a wick left.
Doing the dust dance.
Kicking the foot.
We were waiting.
Living
On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree
—W. S. Merwin
Never wanted to think about
the last day of the world
Do these palms think about it?
That sea? Wedge of blue under blue?
You can’t be sure of anything now
Sound waves rolling
Finally understanding a phrase
Sitting on hillside in garden
You don’t have to say anything
for conversation to exist
Tiny Journalist Blues
Nothing to give you
that you would want.
Nothing big enough
but freedom.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in which these poems first appeared, some in different versions:
ARC (Canada): “Jerusalem’s Smile”;
The Horn Book Magazine: “Exotic Animals, Book for Children”;
Manoa: “On the Old Back Canal Road by the International Hotel, Guangzhou,” “Gray Road North from Shenzhen”;
Massachusetts Review: “To Netanyahu”;
Plough: “Gaza Is Not Far Away”;
Poetrybay: “‘ISRAEL LETS BULLDOZERS GRIND TO HALT.’”
“Mediterranean Blue” was originally published in Traveling the Blue Road: Poems of the Sea (Seagrass Press, 2017), edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins, and Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees (Olive Branch Press, 2018), edited by Jehan Bseiso and Becky
Thompson.
“You Are Your Own State Department” was originally published in Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection (Green Writers Press, 2019), edited by James Crews.
“Freedom of Speech” and “Wales” were originally published in Drunk in a Midnight Choir (CreateSpace, 2015), edited by Todd Gleason.
“To Sam Maloof’s Armchair” appeared in the Dallas Museum of Art newsletter.
“Jerusalem” was partial text for Al-Quds: Jerusalem, an oratorio composed by Mohammed Fairouz and performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 2016.
With gratitude to Peter Conners, Michael Nye, Miriam Shihab, Ryushin Paul Haller and Tassajara, Eliza Fischer, Steven Barclay, Virginia Duncan, Patrick Lannan and the Lannan Foundation, Carol Kwehock, Marjorie Ransom, Deborah Pope, Konrad Ng, Shangri La and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Arts, Seeds of Peace, for continuing to believe, Debra Sugerman, for her unforgettable films “Dear Mr. President” and “Broken,” and Creativity for Peace camp, Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem and cyberspace, Sani Meo, Ibtisam Barakat, The NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, all my sister and brother Arab American writers, our Jewish sisters and brothers who work toward equality and justice, Libby and Len Traubman, my late father Aziz Shihab, author of Does the Land Remember Me? A Memoir of Palestine, (Syracuse University Press), my grandmother Sitti Khadra Shihab Idais Al-Zer, who lived steadily under West Bank occupation, near Janna’s village, until age 106, The Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and our beloved friend Kathleen Sommers of San Antonio, for longtime support and encouragement.
Anthony Bourdain, we wish you had lived forever.
Peace, peace, said all three religions.
They said that. Then?
Our footsteps echoed in the ancient streets.
“It is a shameful moment for US media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state.”
—Noam Chomsky
Tell our story, tell our story.
About the Author
Naomi Shihab Nye joined Facebook to follow Janna. She wishes American politicians would “follow” Janna so they might be better aware of how their money is spent. Janna’s calm and curiosity remind Nye of her father Aziz Shihab, born in Jerusalem in 1927, employed by the BBC while yet a teen—always a believer in getting facts and truth “out there.” Aziz would become a lifelong journalist as Naomi became a lifelong creative writer, publishing her first poems at age seven, the same age when Janna started posting videos. Currently on faculty at Texas State University, Naomi is recipient of the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters.