A poet walks the line.

• Author: Hirschfield, Robert
• Position: Naomi Shihab Nye

A week after 9/11, a woman in San Antonio sent off an e-mail to five friends, under the heading: "Letter from Naomi Shihab Nye, Arab-American Poet: To Any Would-Be Terrorists." Here was her message: "I am sorry to have to call you that, but I don't know how else to get your attention. I hate that word. Do you know how hard some of us have worked to get rid of that word, to deny its instant connection to the Middle East? And now look. Look what extra work we have."

Nye was born in St. Louis to an American mother and a Palestinian father, Aziz Shihab, a refugee from the war of 1948. Her first images of Palestine as a little girl were the blue airmail letter sheets he would send to relatives back home or receive in return. She recalls "how the light would come through those translucent pages! There was something magical about words that traveled so far."

Being American and Palestinian puts her at the confluence of two warring rivers, an uncomfortable position that grew only more painful during Israel's assault on Gaza and Lebanon this summer.

"Where is common sense?" she asks. "Is intensified, extended violence going to help things in the long run?" She denounces the devastating loss of civilian life and infrastructure in Lebanon, and she is grieved by U.S. support for Israel's actions.

"It is unfathomable," she says, "that we have people without empathy in positions of power affecting so many innocents."

Nye also has a hard time fathoming the silence in the United States that greeted Israel's war on Lebanon. "It shocks me how many people seem to be able to avoid mentioning 'what goes on' even as it is happening," she says.

A short woman with a rich throaty laugh, Nye, fifty-four, credits her grandmother Khadra Shihab with being her guiding spirit.

In the introduction to her acclaimed book of poetry, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Nye writes that she could hear her grandmother urging her to speak out: "It's your job. Speak for me, too. Say how much I hate it. Say it's not who we are."

A finalist for the National Book Award for poetry in 2002, Gazelle contains the poem "Blood," in which Nye writes about 9/11 :

I call my father, we talk around the news It is too much for him, neither of his two languages can reach it. Nye's own poetic language is quiet, spare, humorously conversational, and almost unfailingly kind. In her poem "The Crossed-Out Word" from her book

Robert Hirschfleld is a freelancer who writes for many...