Right Now

August 4, 2014
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?


Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate through the Poetry Foundation (Chicago). Her most recent book is Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (Greenwillow, 2020). Aziz Shihab’s last book was Does the Land Remember Me? A Memoir of Palestine (Syracuse University Press, 2007).