Blood
Nye remembers her Palestinian father through the small parables he passed down — and asks what a 'true Arab' can do when the headlines themselves clot in the blood.
“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” my father would say. And he’d prove it, cupping the buzzer instantly while the host with the swatter stared.
In the spring our palms peeled like snakes. True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
(excerpt)
About this poem
“Blood” moves between tender, wry memories of Nye’s father — catching a fly in his hands, explaining that the family name Shihab, “shooting star,” is “a good name, borrowed from the sky” — and the grief of watching Palestine in the news: “Today the headlines clot in my blood. / A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.” It closes on the question that hangs over the whole poem: “What does a true Arab do now?”
The poem was collected in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995) and again in Fuel (1998), and it has become one of Nye’s most anthologized works — it also appears in A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba (Saqi, 2019).
Sources
Connected in the archive
3 connected records3 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
written by — 1 record
- Naomi Shihab Nye
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "naomi-shihab-nye" → Naomi Shihab Nye
named in this record — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Nakba
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The poem was collected in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995) and again in Fuel (1998), and it has become one of Nye's most anthologized works — it also appears in A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba (Saqi, 2019).
- The Nakba
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The poem was collected in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995) and again in Fuel (1998), and it has become one of Nye's most anthologized works — it also appears in A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba (Saqi, 2019).
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Blood — Naomi Shihab Nye.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poems/blood.- MLA
“Blood — Naomi Shihab Nye.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poems/blood. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-blood, title = {Blood — Naomi Shihab Nye}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poems/blood}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }