Poetry Friday - Steps

I've been reading Naomi Shihab Nye's collection Fuel and it has many wonderful poems in it (though I find the cover image quite creepy). One of these wonderful poems is called "Steps" and it begins this way:


STEPS

A man letters the sign for his grocery in Arabic and English.
Paint dries more quickly in English.
The thick swoops and curls of Arabic letters stay moist
and glistening till tomorrow when the children show up
jingling their dimes.


My favorite lines are in the third stanza:

"One of these children will tell a story that keeps her people
Alive. We don't yet know which one she is."

Now I think of those lines when I look at my students. One of them will, we hope. We just don't know which one.

You can read the rest of the poem here, because a group called STEPS, which studies colonial and transnational studies in Switzerland, is using it on its home page. Very appropriate.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.