Naomi Shihab Nye, reading two poems from TRANSFER

I read somewhere that what characterizes a saint is that the saint is interested in everybody else; if this is so, then Naomi Shihab Nye is one of our saints.  To be with her is to feel her intense curiosity about everything.  Her latest book, TRANSFER, focuses principally on the loss of her father--the sort of person, we sense from her writing, that cultivated precisely that sense of openness, despite the awful personal and historical dislocations that he suffered as a Palestinian.  Two poems here deliver vignettes in that unwinding grief.