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).