Naomi Shihab Nye's "The Traveling Onion"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University.

Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her other books of poetry include Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020); The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019); Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (Greenwillow Books, 2018); Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011); You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), and the forthcoming Grace Notes: Poems About Families. She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children's Book Award in 1998.

Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, “her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, March 8, 2024.
0:10.3	Today's poem is by Naomi Shihab Nye, and it's called The Traveling Onion.
0:16.4	I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it again if my eyes aren't watering too badly.
0:24.9	It's an onion joke. It'll be okay.
0:28.4	Here's the traveling onion.
0:31.9	Epigraph.
0:33.4	It is believed that the onion originally came from India.
0:37.1	In Egypt, it was an object of worship.
0:39.4	Why, I haven't been able to find out. From Egypt, the onion entered Greece and onto Italy,
0:45.1	thence into all of Europe, from the Better Living Cookbook.
0:51.5	When I think how far the onion has traveled just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise all small forgotten miracles, crackly paper peeling on the drainboard, pearly layers and smooth agreement, the way the knife enters onion and onion falls apart on the chopping block, a history revealed.
1:14.1	And I would never scold the onion for causing tears. It is right that tears fall for something
1:19.7	small and forgotten. How at meal we sit to eat, commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma,
1:26.8	but never on the translucence of onion,
1:29.9	now limp, now divided, or its traditionally honorable career for the sake of others disappear.
1:50.3	We have featured other poems in praise of the onion here on the daily poem,
1:55.0	most notably a Pablo Neruda's ode to the onion.
2:02.6	And even though I can produce several poems about onions, I've got to say there probably aren't enough poems in praise of the onion. And this one is particularly good because in many ways,
2:08.8	it treats the praise of the onion as a kind of meta,metaphor for what poetry tends to do really well all of the time,
2:24.4	and that is to help us to notice, to draw our attention to small but valuable things
2:33.2	by making those small but valuable things by making those small but valuable things less small so that we can see
	...

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