Naomi Nye
I and other chaplains and hospital caregivers from around the Dallas area will be spending a day with the internationally acclaimed poet Naomi Nye as part of the ongoing commemoration of Parkland Hospital’s 50th anniversary.
OK, Naomi Nye poetry–it’s not Texas-OU football.
Some of us are excited nonetheless because she writes beautiful poetry and beauty in all its forms is one of the greatest gifts God gave us.
And your Rev. Jitterbugger believes that if you seek after beauty, beauty will happen.
That’s another way of saying that if you seek after God, God will happen.
*** Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and songwriter born in 1952 to a Palestinian father and American mother. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas. Both roots and sense of place are major themes in her body of work.
Her first collection of poems, Different Ways to Pray, explored the theme of similarities and differences between cultures, which would become one of her lifelong areas of focus.
Half-And-Half by Naomi Shihab Nye
You can’t be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So, half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can’t love
anyone else. Says he.
At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,
he’s sweeping. The rubbed stones
feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar
across faces of date-stuffed mamool.
This morning we lit the slim white candles
which bend over at the waist by noon.
For once the priests weren’t fighting
in the church for the best spots to stand.
As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
This is partly why he prays in no language
but his own. Why I press my lips
to every exception.
A woman opens a window—here and here and here—
placing a vase of blue flowers
on an orange cloth. I follow her.
She is making a soup from what she had left
in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
She is leaving nothing out.
