A Maze Me

The Texas Observer.

Poetry from A to Z, edited by Paul Janeczko.

Cover art © 2014 by Betsy Peterschmidt
Cover design by Paul Zakris

She has been honored with a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, and four Pushcart Prizes. She is also author of the poetry collections Voices in the Air, Honeybee, and A Maze Me. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

She was named a National Book Award finalist for 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE is the Young People’s Poet Laureate for 2019–2021.

My mind
is always
open.
I don’t think
there’s even
a door.

No kid in the world wakes up hoping
people will fight around her house
or inside it either.

We can barely imagine
our own familiar neighborhoods
blowing up—poof!
Everything being broken or gone.
So dumb!

But people are still fighting.
Far off, where we can’t see or hear them.