Words for Thought
Current Events

Right Now

August 4, 2014
by Naomi Shihab Nye
M. Flickr
Photo by M./Flickr

 

Today on the phone,
first time in thirty years,
my friend didn’t know me.
Who? Where do you live?
Where did we meet?
She’s been slipping for a while.
I wonder if that’s how God feels
about Israel right now.
Who are you again?
Did you really suffer?

Poems
Poetry
Naomi Shihab Nye
Israel
Palestine
Gaza

Naomi Shihab Nye was the laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature (see WLT, Jan. 2014) as well as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022. Her most recent book is The Turtle of Michigan (Greenwillow, 2022).