THE
Tiny Journalist
Naomi Shihab Nye
THE
Tiny Journalist
POEMS
American Poets Continuum Series, No. 170
BOA Editions, Ltd. Rochester, NY 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Naomi Shihab Nye
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
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Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 124 for special individual acknowledgments.
Cover Design: Sandy Knight
Cover Art: “House with Two Gardens” by Christina Brinkman
Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster
BOA Logo: Mirko
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nye, Naomi Shihab, author.
Title: The tiny journalist : poems / Naomi Shihab Nye.
Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., [2019] | Series: American poets continuum series, ; no. 170 | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018050933 (print) | LCCN 2018055328 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683841 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683728 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781942683735 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—Women authors—21st century.
Classification: LCC PS3564.Y44 (ebook) | LCC PS3564.Y44 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050933
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A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)
In memory
May Mansoor Munn
author of Where Do Dreams and Dreaming Go?
A Palestinian Quaker in America
And in honor of Janna Jihad Ayyad
and her cousin Ahed Tamimi—
all young people devoted to justice
and sharing their voices.
“We will never give up in the peace place,
in the Holy Land, we’ll see the peace one day.”
—Janna Jihad Ayyad
“… I am particularly inspired by the people of Gaza
who put all of us to shame with their resilience and steadfastness.”
—Sani Meo, Publisher, This Week in Palestine
“From presidents Truman to Trump, US administrations have never
actually been ‘an honest broker’ of peace between Palestinians and
Israelis, regardless of all the rhetoric and official positions.”
—Mohamed Mohamed, Palestine Center Brief No. 320
“Revived bitterness
is unnecessary unless
One is ignorant.”
—Marianne Moore, American poet
“Apartheid means fundamentalist clergy spearheading the deepening of segregation, inequality, supremacism, and subjugation.
Apartheid means … separate, segregated roads and highways for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank.
Apartheid means hundreds of attacks by settlers targeting Palestinian property, livelihoods, and lives, without convictions, charges, or even suspects. Apartheid means uncounted Palestinians jailed without trial, shot dead without trial, shot dead in the back while fleeing and without just cause.
Apartheid means Israeli officials using the army, police, military courts, and draconian administrative detentions, not only to head off terrorism, but to curtail nearly every avenue of non-violent protest available to Palestinians.”
—Bradley Burston, Haaretz, 2015
Author’s Note:
My father’s Palestinian family, refugees from their Jerusalem home after 1948, lived in a village not far from Nabi Saleh village, where Janna Jihad Ayyad and her family live. I lived between Jerusalem and Ramallah as a teenager and witnessed many of the struggles firsthand, which have unfortunately only heightened and intensified in the succeeding years. It is important to clarify that these poems or sections thereof are not Janna’s actual words. They are “my” words, imagining Janna’s circumstances via her Facebook postings and my own personal and collective knowledge of the situation she was born into and lives with on a daily basis. So the texts presented here are a blending of stories—my father’s, Janna’s, my ongoing research, and my own personal experience living there and on many subsequent journeys. In the way of all poetry, hopefully it gets something true or right.
Also:
Since Palestinians are also Semites, being pro-justice
for Palestinians is never an anti-Semitic position, no matter what anybody says.
Contents
I.
Morning Song
Moon over Gaza
Exotic Animals, Book for Children
Janna
Separation Wall
Dareen Said Resist
In Northern Ireland They Called It “The Troubles”
How Long?
For Palestine
Small People
Women in Black
And That Mysterious Word Holy
Netanyahu
Studying English
Losing as Its Own Flower
Pink
Mothers Waiting for Their Sons
“ISRAELIS LET BULLDOZERS GRIND TO HALT”
Harvest
Shadow
Dead Sea
Tattoo
Sometimes There Is a Day
Advice
America Gives Israel Ten Million Dollars a Day
Gratitude List
It Was or It Wasn’t
Gaza Is Not Far Away
My Wisdom
Each Day We Are Given So Many Gifts
Jerusalem
Missing It
A Person in Northern Ireland
38 Billion
Better Vision
The Space We’re In
No Explosions
II.
Facebook Notes
Mediterranean Blue
To Netanyahu
Pharmacy
My Father, on Dialysis
Blood on All Your Shirts
My Immigrant Dad, On Voting
You Are Your Own State Department
Elementary
On the Old Back Canal Road by the International Hotel, Guangzhou
Gray Road North from Shenzhen
Stun
All I Can Do
In Some Countries
Seeing His Face
Wales
Peace Talks
Freedom of Speech (What the head-of-school told me)
Jerusalem’s Smile
On the Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King
False Alarm Hawai‘i
A Palestinian Might Say
Alien Rescue
The Sweeper
Arab Festival T-shirt
One Small Sack in Syria
Positivism
Regret
Salvation
The Old Journalist Talks to Janna
Grandfathers Say
The Old Journalist Writes …
Friend
Happy Birthday
Stay Afloat
To Sam Maloof’s Armchair
Unforgettable
Rumor Mill
Patience Conversations
Living
Tiny Journalist Blues
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Colophon
I.
Morning Song
For Janna
The tiny journalist
will tell us what she sees.
Document the moves, the dust,
soldiers blocking the road.
Yes, she knows how to take a picture
with her phone. Holds it high
like a balloon. Yes, she would
prefer to dance and play,
would prefer the world
to be pink. It is her job to say
what she sees, what is happening.
From her vantage point everything
is huge—but don’t look down on her.
She’s bigger than you are.
If you stomp her garden
each leaf expands its view.
Don’t hide what you do.
She sees you at 2 a.m. adjusting your
impenetrable vest.
What could she have
that you want? Her treasures,
the shiny buttons her grandmother loved.
Her cousin, her uncle.
There might have been a shirt …
The tiny journalist notices
action on far away roads
farther even than the next village.
She takes counsel from bugs so
puffs of dust find her first.
Could that be a friend?
They pretended not to see us.
They came at night with weapons.
What was our crime? That we liked
respect as they do? That we have pride?
She stares through a hole in the fence,
barricade of words and wire,
feels the rising fire
before anyone strikes a match.
She has a better idea.
Moon over Gaza
I am lonely
for my friends.
They liked me,
trusted my coming.
I think they looked up at me
more than other people do.
I who have been staring down so long
see no reason for the sorrows humans make.
I dislike the scuffle of bombs blasting
very much. It blocks my view.
A landscape of grieving
feels different afterwards.
Different sheen from a simple desert,
rubble of walls, silent children who once said
my name like a prayer.
Sometimes I am bigger than
a golden plate,
a giant coin,
and everyone gasps.
Maybe it is wrong
that I am so calm.
Exotic Animals, Book for Children
Armadillo means
“little armored one.”
Some of us become this to survive
in our own countries.
I would like to see an armadillo
crossing the road.
Our armor is invisible,
it polishes itself.
We might have preferred to be
a softer animal, wouldn’t you?
With fur and delicate paws,
like an African Striped Grass Mouse,
also known as Zebra Mouse.
Janna
At 7, making videos.
At 10, raising the truth flag.
At 11, raising it higher,
traveling to South Africa,
keffiyah knotted on shoulders,
interviews in airports.
Please, could you tell us …
You know gazing into a camera
can be a bridge, so you stare
without blinking.
People drift to the sides of the film,
don’t want to be noticed,
put on the spot.
You know the spot is the only thing
that matters.
What else? Long days,
tired trousers pinned
on roof lines,
nothing good expected.
It’s right in front of me,
I didn’t go looking for it.
We’re living in the middle of trouble.
No reason not to say it straight.
They do not consider us equal.
They blame us for everything,
forgetting what they took,
how they took it.
We are made of bone and flesh and story
but they poke their big guns
into our faces
and our front doors
and our living rooms
as if we are vapor.
Why can’t they see
how beautiful we are?
The saddest part?
We all could have had
twice as many friends.
Separation Wall
When the milk is sour,
it separates.
The next time you stop speaking,
ask yourself why you were born.
They say they are scared of us.
The nuclear bomb is scared of the cucumber.
When my mother asks me to slice cucumbers,
I feel like a normal person with fantastic dilemmas:
Do I make rounds or sticks? Shall I trim the seeds?
I ask my grandmother if there was ever a time
she felt like a normal person every day,
not in danger, and she thinks for as long
as it takes a sun to set and says, Yes.
I always feel like a normal person.
They just don’t see me as one.
We would like the babies not to find out about
the failures waiting for them. I would like
them to believe on the other side of the wall
is a circus that just hasn’t opened yet. Our friends,
learning how to juggle, to walk on tall poles.
Dareen Said Resist
And went to jail.
We were asking, What?
You beat us with butts of guns
for years,
tear-gas our grandmas,
and you can’t take
Resist?
In Northern Ireland They Called It “The Troubles”
What do we call it?
The very endless nightmare?
The toothache of tragedy?
I call it the life no one would choose.
To be always on guard,
never secure,
jumping when a skillet drops.
I watch the babies finger their
cups and spoons and think
they don’t know yet.
They don’t know how empty
the cup of hope can feel.
Here in the land of tea and coffee
offered on round trays a million times
a day, still a thirst so great
you could die every night, longing
for a better life.
How Long?
The tiny journalist
is growing taller very quickly.
She’s adding breadth, depth,
to every conversation,
asking different questions, not just
Who What When Where Why?
but How long? How can it be?
What makes this seem right to you?
Even when she isn’t present,
she might be taping from the trees.
What happened to you in the twentieth century?
Remember? We never forgot about it. You did.
Rounded up at gunpoint,
our people
brutally beaten, pummeled in prisons,
massacred for a rumor of stones.
Once there was a stuffed squash
who didn’t wish to be eaten.
Kousa habibti, pine nuts for eyes.
I dreamed about her when I was five.
She helped me start my mission.
For Palestine
In memory, Fr. Gerry Reynolds of Belfast, “Let us pray for Palestine”
How lonely the word PEACE is becoming.
Missing her small house under the olive trees.
The grandmothers carried her in a bucket when
they did their watering.
She waited for them in the sunrise,
then fell back into reach. Whole lives unfolded.
The uncles tucked her into suit coat pockets
after buttoning white shirts for another day.
Fathers, mothers, babies
heard her whispering in clouds over Palestine,
mingling softly, making a promise,
sending her message to the ground.
It wasn’t a secret.
Things will calm down soon, she said.
Hold your head up. Don’t forget.
When Ahed went to prison, we shook
our tired hands in the air and wept.
Young girl dreaming of a better world!
Don’t shoot her cousins, my cousins, our cousins.
Wouldn’t you slap for that?
It was only a slap.
The word Peace a ticket elsewhere for some.
People dreamed night and day of calmer lives.
Maybe Peace would be their ticket back too.
They never threw away that hope. Karmic wheel,
great myth of fairness kept spinning …
I dreamed of Ahed’s hair.
When I was born, they say
a peaceful breeze lilted the branches—
my first lullaby. The temperature dropped.
A voice pressed me forward,
told me to speak.
Being raised in a house of stories with garlic
gave me courage.
Everything began, Far, far away. Long, long ago.
And everything held us close.
Is this your story, or mine?
Olive oil lives in a dented can with a long spout.
What happens to Peace when people fight?
(She hides her face.)
What does she dream of?
(Better people.)
Does she ever give up?