wanderlust

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age the child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

My husband, photographer Michael Nye, once photographed in a West Bank Palestinian refugee camp for days, and was followed around by a little girl who wanted him to photograph her. Finally, he did, and she held up a stone with a poem etched into it. (This picture appears on the cover of my collection of poems, 19 Varieties of Gazelle – Poems of the Middle East). Through a translator, Michael understood that the poem was ‘her poem’ – that’s what she called it. We urged my dad to translate the verse, which sounded vaguely familiar, but without checking roundly enough, we quoted the translation on the book flap and said she had written the verse. Quickly, angry scholars wrote to me pointing out that the verse was from a famous Darwish poem. I felt terrible. I was meeting him for the first and last time the next week. Handing over the copy of the book sheepishly, I said: ‘Please forgive our mistake. If this book ever gets reprinted, I promise we will give the proper credit for the verse.’ He stared closely at the picture. Tears ran down his cheeks. ‘Don’t correct it,’ he said. ‘It is the goal of my life to write poems that are claimed by children.’

naomi shihab nye

After hearts shot through with arrows, we have bunnies, followed by a warlike fire in the sky, then ghosts, turkeys to honour more ghosts, and a baby born in a barn who is not yet a ghost but also a ghost, for whom we drag trees inside where they do not belong.

mary ruefle

A few years ago, while on retreat in Tulum, Mexico, I met an older Mayan woman who told me my liver contained some trapped fury. She referred to it as my small fist. She gave me a flower that represented this portion of pent-up rage and told me to release it in the ocean. Cut to my fourth attempt to send the ceremonial flower out to sea. Foiled by the wind, which kept whipping it back in my face, I waded farther and farther out in my cotton dress, until I was chest deep – laughing, furious – in a froth of wavelets yelling, fucking go already….

kyo maclear

Among the Samurai class in feudal Japan, it was de riguer for women to be trained in weapons arts. There are whole martial arts that are traditionally for women, and we’re not talking gentle, either. Are you at all familiar with the Naginata, one of the classic weapons of feudal Japan? (If not, think a two foot sword blade on the end of a four foot pole; in use, it’s whirled around the body, and opponents basically get to find out what vegetables feel like when you drop them into a food processor.) It’s a women’s weapon – the classic women’s weapon of the Samurai class – and to this day, it’s primarily practiced by women.

naginata