Jerusalem

Naomii Shihab Nye is obviously very anti-war. She knows that it doesn’t matter who was there first or who was oppressed more. She is talking not only about how nonsensical war is but also how infectious it can be. Her father has a scar from his childhood because a friend threw a rock at him instead of at a bird. The violence made a soft spot that could not filled but…“the boy who has fallen stands up”. When she wrote, “Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:/big guns, little pills/If you tilt your head just slightly it’s ridiculous” she means that you don’t have to change your perspective to see how unreasonable people are being. It doesn’t matter what is happening now as much as ending all the violence now. In my opinion, this poem is a little bit hypocritical because she says “A child’s poem says,/’I don’t like wars,/ they end up with monuments’….Why are we so monumentally slow?...It’s late but everything comes next.” She wants things to change but she herself is not actively doing anything. She is the child in that verse but children can’t end wars they just complain about them. However, every writers writes for a reason and she obviously has very strong opinions on this topic to spread it through a whole book of poems.