Morning Song

“Morning Song” is a lyric poem by American poet/novelist Naomi Shihab Nye from her poetry collection The Tiny Journalist (2019). The poem and the collection bring to light Nye’s Palestinian roots as well as the activism of then seven year old (a teenager in 2022) Janna Jihad Ayyad against the occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank. In interviews, Ayyad said, “My camera is my weapon,” which sets the stage for Nye to channel the young girl’s voice in her poem. “Morning Song” neatly fits with Nye’s work as a self-described “wandering poet” in which she receives inspiration from her travels and experiences from childhood. This poem delves into ideas of oppression, a “glass half full” mentality, and contemporary journalistic tactics the youth employ to deal with the devastating circumstances in which they are forced to exist.     

Poet Biography

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri to an American mother and Palestinian father whose family became refugees when Israel was created in 1948. At age six, Nye wrote her first poem, and at 13, she moved to Palestine for a brief time so her father could care for his ailing mother. They then moved to San Antonio, Texas where Nye settled while regularly traveling. She was editor of San Antonio High School’s literary magazine and pursued a bachelor’s degree in English and World Religions at Trinity University. After graduation, Nye began teaching children through the Texas Commission on the Arts and worked as a creative writing professor at Texas State University.

In 1978, she married attorney/photographer/writer Michael Nye with whom she has one son. Nye published her first collection of poetry titled Different Ways to Pray in 1980. She has continued to publish, edit, or submit poems to many volumes of poetry for both children and adults. In 1997, she became a Guggenheim Poetry Fellow while also publishing her first young adult novel inspired by her own life. Habibi is about an Arab-American adolescent who moves to Jerusalem in the 1970s. In 1999, Nye collaborated with her husband on a children’s poetry collection titled What Have You Lost?

In 2019, alongside publishing The Tiny Journalist collection, she became Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate.

Poem Link

Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Morning Song.” 2019. poets.org.

Summary

The speaker of “Morning Song” immediately and proudly introduces the “tiny journalist” (Line 1) who records what she sees using her phone. The speaker notes that the journalist would rather be a typical young girl but instead has to observe her surroundings and share her observations with the world: “Yes, she would / prefer to dance and play” (Lines 7-8). Even though she is young, “she’s bigger than you are” (Line 14). The speaker continues to caution the reader: “Don’t hide what you do” (Line 17), because the tiny journalist is watching. The speaker questions what the journalist’s “enemies” could possibly want from her, including family treasures: “the shiny buttons her grandmother loved” (Line 22). The journalist has the ability to detect activity “on far away roads” (Line 26), as she communicates with “bugs so / puffs of dust find her first” (Lines 28-29). Nye employs the use of italics and first-person to indicate thoughts of the journalist: “They pretended not to see us” (Line 31), and repeated questions like, “What was our crime?” (Line 33) The tiny journalist is prepared and able to sense danger before it even happens, or “before anyone strikes a match” (Line 38). The final, hopeful line of the poem suggests the young journalist has ideas about a more promising future.