Are you looking for an “experience” gift for someone you love? Registration for our January 8-13, 2024, Write Together session is open. I’d love to see you or your loved one in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. Fee: $200, with two $100 no-questions-asked scholarships available. 

This poem, lettered on handmade paper and framed, hangs on a wall in my house, a collective gift from friends a few years ago. Sometimes, when I feel hopeless in the face of it all, I recite lines from it to help un-paralyze myself. A small act of goodness is still a way to help the world.

Famous, by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   
which knew it would inherit the earth   
before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   
watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   
is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   
more famous than the dress shoe,   
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   
who smile while crossing streets,   
sticky children in grocery lines,   
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Click here for more information about the wondrous Naomi Shihab Nye. Famous is included in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye.

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My podcast: Words by Winter