Response to "19 Varieties of Gazelle" by Naomi Shihab Nye

     I think from the introduction of the book there was a sense of strong belief and strong feelings that the author herself was trying to convey.  She made it clear that she was trying to combine her two worlds of Palestine and the United States.  The poem in the introduction talks of a prisoner that does not know the tragedy of 9/11 yet and how peace of not knowing could be bliss.  She is already bringing up a connection with 9/11 and kind of a division between where she is from and where she is.
     Throughout her book of poetry she has a strong connection of family especially her father and her grandmother.  They hold a special place in her heart and they are the continuous characters in her poetry.  In "My Father and the Fig tree"  she expressed her father's love for figs and how it reminded him of his home country in Palestine and how he found a piece of him with a fig tree in the backyard in there Dallas, Texas home.

"There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,

a tree with the largest, fattest,

sweetest figs in the world"

     In "My Grandmother Under the Stars" you can get a deep sense of how she honored and loved her grandmother very much.  She talks about missing her wisdom and stories as she does in many of the poems that she writes about her grandmother.  

" You and I on a roof at sunset,

our two languages adrift, 

heart saying, Take this home with you,

never again,

and only memory making us rich."

     I really enjoyed her poetry and it reminded me of my family.  My family didn't come from another country and we are so Americanized that we really don't don't have much of a family heritage.  It just makes me think if one day I will be telling my kids and grand kids that our family was so huge we use to have big picnics and at every party we had a pickle and olive juice.  I would tell them how my grandfather use to sing and my grandmother would hit him.  I felt that family connection in her poems and it stuck out to me.