Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year with help and contributions from Kashiana Singh and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Technically, National Poetry Month is over, but we didn’t quite get to thirty, so I thought I would squeeze a few more in.

Today’s poem, You Are Your Own State Department, was written by Naomi Shihab Nye, a woman who is, in many respects, much like her poem.

A common process in poetry is to describe something by talking about its pieces to give you a better picture of the whole. This poem is a first-person viewpoint, commentaries from her wanderings in life, and why she tries always (as we all should) to improve the things that we see wrong in the world. Even if it is only little things. That mirrors the idea of a thing being made of its smaller parts. And this too is a common process - that the form of a poem is chosen sometimes to mirror the thought process or the subject.

First, just a few comments about the poet. Born in 1952 in Saint Louis, Missouri, to Palestinian and Swiss/German parents, she has written poetry, novels, essays, and songs, authoring or contributing to thirty books, and editing several collections. She recently served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate for the Poetry Foundation. She is known for finding novel but clear perspectives on people, things, places, and circumstances. You will hear those things very clearly in today’s poem. It starts out:

Each day I miss Japanese precision. Trying to arrange things

the way they would. I miss the call to prayer

at Sharjah, the large collective pause. Or

the shy strawberry vendor with rickety wooden cart,

single small lightbulb pointed at a mound of berries.

In one of China’s great cities, before dawn.

Nye has commented that her poetry comes from a combination of: “local life, random characters met on the streets, [and] our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” The poem continues,

Forever I miss my Arab father’s way with mint leaves

floating in a cup of sugared tea—his delicate hands

arranging rinsed figs on a plate. What have we here?

said the wolf in the children’s story

stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.

Is this small monster one of us?

And she talks about those people - sometimes people who are displaced or themselves living under fear or hatred of one kind or another, and those small things they contribute:

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