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    Fuel
    Fuel
    Fuel
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    Fuel

    By Naomi Shihab Nye

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    About this ebook

    Naomi Shihab Nye focuses on ordinary people and ordinary situations, which, when rendered through the poems in Fuel, become remarkable. The poet imagines the border families of southern Texas, small ferns and forgotten books, Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. Nye has written, "Lives unlike mine, you save me."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateDec 20, 2013
    ISBN9781938160561
    Author

    Naomi Shihab Nye

    Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and she spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than forty years traveling the country and the world, leading writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty books. Her books of poetry for adults and young people include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a finalist for the National Book Award); A Maze Me: Poems for Girls; Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners; Honeybee (winner of the Arab American Book Award); Cast Away: Poems of Our Time (one of the Washington Post’s best books of 2020); Come with Me: Poems for a Journey; and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her other volumes of poetry include Red Suitcase; Words Under the Words; Fuel; Transfer; You & Yours; Mint Snowball; and The Tiny Journalist. Her collections of essays include Never in a Hurry and I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven. Naomi Shihab Nye has edited nine acclaimed poetry anthologies, including This Same Sky: Poems from Around the World; The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems from the Middle East; Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25; and What Have You Lost? Her picture books include Sitti’s Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, and her acclaimed fiction includes Habibi; The Turtle of Oman (winner of the Middle East Book Award) and its sequel, The Turtle of Michigan (honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award). Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Award, and "The Betty," from Poets House, for service to poetry, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry-reading series in the country. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials, including The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and she also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been affiliated with the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin for twenty years and served as poetry editor at the Texas Observer for twenty years. In 2019–20 she was the poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and in 2017 the American Library Association presented Naomi Shihab Nye with the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award. In 2018 the Texas Institute of Letters named her the winner of the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was named the 2019–21 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Naomi Shihab Nye is professor of creative writing-poetry at Texas State University.

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      Book preview

      Fuel - Naomi Shihab Nye

      MUCHAS GRACIAS POR TODO

      This plane has landed thanks to God and his mercy.

      That’s what they say in Jordan when the plane sets down.

      What do they say in our country? Don’t stand up till we tell you.

      Stay in your seats. Things may have shifted.

      This river has not disappeared thanks to that one big storm

      when the water was almost finished.

      We used to say thanks to the springs

      but the springs dried up so we changed it.

      This rumor tells no truth thanks to people.

      This river walk used to be better when no one came.

      What about the grapes? Thanks to the grapes

      we have more than one story to tell.

      Thanks to a soft place in the middle of the evening.

      Thanks to three secret hours before dawn.

      These deer are seldom seen because of their shyness.

      If you see one you count yourselves among the lucky on the earth.

      Your eyes get quieter.

      These deer have nothing to say to us.

      Thanks to the fan, we are still breathing.

      Thanks to the small toad that lives in cool mud at the base of the zinnias.

      BILL’S BEANS

      for William Stafford

      Under the leaves, they’re long and curling.

      I pull a perfect question mark and two lean twins,

      feeling the magnetic snap of stem, the ripened weight.

      At the end of a day, the earth smells thirsty.

      He left his brown hat, his shovel, and his pen.

      I don’t know how deep bean roots go.

      We could experiment.

      He left the sky over Oregon and the fluent trees.

      He gave us our lives that were hiding under our feet,

      saying, You know what to do.

      So we’ll take these beans

      back into the house and steam them.

      We’ll eat them one by one with our fingers,

      the clean click and freshness.

      We’ll thank him forever for our breath,

      and the brevity of bean.

      WEDDING CAKE

      Once on a plane

      a woman asked me to hold her baby

      and disappeared.

      I figured it was safe,

      our being on a plane and all.

      How far could she go?

      She returned one hour later,

      having changed her clothes

      and washed her hair.

      I didn’t recognize her.

      By this time the baby

      and I had examined

      each other’s necks.

      We had cried a little.

      I had a silver bracelet

      and a watch.

      Gold studs glittered

      in the baby’s ears.

      She wore a tiny white dress

      leafed with layers

      like a wedding cake.

      I did not want

      to give her back.

      The baby’s curls coiled tightly

      against her scalp,

      another alphabet.

      I read new new new.

      My mother gets tired.

      I’ll chew your hand.

      The baby left my skirt crumpled,

      my lap aching.

      Now I’m her secret guardian,

      the little nub of dream

      that rises slightly

      but won’t come clear.

      As she grows,

      as she feels ill at ease,

      I’ll bob my knee.

      What will she forget?

      Whom will she marry?

      He’d better check with me.

      I’ll say once she flew

      dressed like a cake

      between two doilies of cloud.

      She could slip the card into a pocket,

      pull it out.

      Already she knew the small finger

      was funnier than the whole arm.

      GENETICS

      From my father I have inherited the ability

      to stand in a field and stare.

      Look, look at that gray dot by the fence.

      It’s his donkey. My father doesn’t have

      a deep interest in donkeys, more a figurative one.

      To know it’s out there nuzzling the ground.

      That’s how I feel about my life.

      I like to skirt the edges. There it is in the field.

      Feeding itself.

      *

      From my mother, an obsession about the stove

      and correct spelling. The red stove, old as I am, must be

      polished at all times. You don’t know this about me.

      I do it when you’re not home.

      The Magic Chef gleams in his tipped hat.

      Oven shoots to 500 when you set it low.

      Then fluctuates. Like a personality.

      Thanks to my mother I now have an oven thermometer

      but must open the oven door to check it.

      Even when a cake’s in there. Isn’t this supposed to be

      disaster for a cake?

      My mother does crosswords, which I will never do.

      But a word spelled wrongly anywhere

      prickles my skin. Return to beginning

      with pencil, black ink.

      Cross you at the a. Rearrange.

      We had family discussions

      about a preference for the British grey.

      In the spelling bee I tripped on reveille,

      a bugle call, a signal at dawn.

      I have risen early

      ever since.

      BECAUSE OF

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