I was not preparing to be busy. That’s the armor everyone put on to pretend they had a purpose in the world. I refuse to be claimed. Your plate is waiting. We will snip fresh mint into your tea. All of us at the table together. The young writers, the older writers, the readers of all ages, the librarians, guides among books, the Neustadt family, who have championed voices, voices that encouraged us and said we listen and we care. I will try to use your gift in as many ways to help others as I can. That is very important to me, and I will try to be a better writer to deserve it more. I keep feeling so much gratitude for what we are given in our lives. All of us, by way of accident, by way of things we couldn’t have selected ourselves . The worlds we are born into, the people we are related to, the landscapes we learn to love wherever we are. On the terrible day of September 11, 2001, I was in Oklahoma, working at Holland Hall school in Tulsa with some of the kindest people I will ever know. Our grief mingled on that shocking day. Always when I thought about healing, I have thought about your state and the long bus ride home and how the students I was visiting with on that day had been standing up for peace, connectedness, knowing people who are not exactly like them, at the terrible moment we got the news. I think of my beloved friend Grace Paley, one of my favorite writers, who said in one of her stories, “Imagination!” (she often spoke with exclamation points). “That’s one of the gifts hundreds of generations of women and men working, eating, loving, have given us. Why has it been used to break the world apart into smaller and smaller pieces? It couldn’t have been easy to do, because we animals, bugs, trees, are connected to one another by streams of spit, water, necessity. The hard hug of sunlight holds us all and we are attached to this earth by the fact of gravity as well as the invention of love.” The connectors have always been there. What do we do with them? I thought about connection listening to your wonderful Iraqi music photo : pieter stockmans January–February 2014 • 51 Business Naomi Shihab Nye “Syrian refugees go about their business in a refugee camp in Mafraq, Jordan . . .” Ropes on poles, jeans & shirts flapping in wind. He sits on a giant bag of rice, head in hands. Too much or too little, rips & bursts & furrows. Something seared in a pan. If you knew a mother, any mother, you would care for mothers, yes? No. What it is to be lonesome for stacked papers on a desk, under glass globe, brass vase with standing pencils, new orders. How quickly urgencies of doing disappear. And where is the child from the next apartment, whose crying kept him awake these last terrible months? Where do you file this unknowing? Editorial note: To listen to the author read this poem along with musical accompaniment, visit the WLT website (worldliteraturetoday.org). First published in Great River Review (Spring/Summer 2013) and reprinted here by permission of the author. ...