Poetry

Fuel

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BOA Editions · "Estate Sale" by Naomi Shihab Nye

In the poem, "Bill's Beans," dedicated to her mentor, William Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye writes of finding beans, "under the leaves, they're secretly long and curling./ I pull a perfect question mark and two lean twins, / feeling the magnetic snap of stem, the ripened weight." In this poetry collection, Nye continually shows us how to look "under the leaves" as she writes on topics ranging from the border families of southern Texas, small ferns and forgotten books, to Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East.

Hidden
If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone
has swallowed it.

If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.

No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 1998

FormatPaperback , Audiobook

Publication DateJanuary 1, 1998

ISBN1-880238-63-2

From $5.00

About the Author

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes including six collections of poetry from BOA Editions: Sidekick (2026), Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You & Yours (2005), Transfer (2011), and The Tiny Journalist (2019). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow. Her numerous awards include a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Patterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize the Betty Prize from Poets House for her service to poetry, and the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. She served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2010–2015, and in May 2019 she was named the 2019–2021 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation.