Nesreen

“I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
”
― Naomi Shihab Nye

“you will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf
know you could tumble at any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

--The Art of Disappearing”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets

“I want to be someone making music/with my coming.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls

“Making a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern
past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems