This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Kindness’ by Naomi Shihab Nye and I felt this was the perfect poem today, post birthday. I received a huge amount of birthday wishes, artwork and personal messages from all around the world yesterday and I have still not read them all, I savour them. My overwhelming feeling was of the kindness of everyone who took the time and trouble to communicate with me, about something so relatively trivial as my birthday, in relation to the devastation of the world in which we are currently living. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I think you’ll all really enjoy this poem and the corresponding matched artwork.
Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University.
Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020.) Her other books of poetry include The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019); Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (Greenwillow Books, 2018); Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011); You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; and 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East.
She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children’s Book award in 1998.
Naomi Shihab Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, “her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”
I have selected this image by @hendrinua – Jeroen Hendriks as it represents the kindness of nature, heavy with blossom. You can follow him on Instagram, here.
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To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
