Poetry , Audio

Business

by  Naomi Shihab Nye
Photo by Pieter Stockmans

“Syrian refugees go about their business in 
a refugee camp in Mafraq, Jordan . . .” 

Ropes on poles, jeans & shirts flapping in wind.
He sits on a giant bag of rice, head in hands. 

Too much or too little, rips & bursts & furrows. 
Something seared in a pan. 

If you knew a mother, any mother, you would care
for mothers, yes? No.  

What it is to be lonesome for stacked papers
on a desk, under glass globe, 

brass vase with standing pencils,
new orders. 

How quickly urgencies of doing disappear. 
And where is the child from the next apartment,

whose crying kept him awake
these last terrible months?  

Where do you file this unknowing?


Laureate of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature in 2013, Palestinian American writer, editor, and educator Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she continues to live. She has been Young People’s Poet Laureate for the US, poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine and Texas Observer, and a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award. She received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and the National Book Critics Circle.

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