There are small fires burning in New York beneath the ruined buildings. There is a map of known absences. A map of absences-to-come. A blank, unblinking sky. Each night is disturbed by planes, and we count our days by mornings. Someone's a hero. Someone else is Hitler. The newscasters talk, and our chart of desert friends and foes is made, erased, and remade.

As we try to make sense of what happened on September 11, we butt up against an uncomfortable edge and end up circling a militant narcissism. Our American English serves us best when it's hard at regular business, but ruptures when we're faced with ambiguous feelings or immense grief, sadness, and anger. National compassion stops abruptly at some foreign borders.

On September 12, the organizers of Hugo House's symposium on maps handed me excerpts from a book called The Space Between Our Footsteps (Simon & Schuster, 1998), a collection of work by Middle Eastern poets and painters compiled by Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye is a Palestinian-American writer who has penned more than 26 books. Her words and the work she gathered in The Space Between Our Footsteps offered olive trees, and cardamom, and rain--images to contradict the flat portraits being repeated on TV.

Wanting to read more Nye, I picked up her latest book, Mint Snowball (Anhinga Press, 2001), a collection of paragraphs leaning toward prose poems that trace a map of Nye's life from her mixed-culture childhood in St. Louis through the streets of Jerusalem, where she attended school, through Palestinian villages, where relatives live, and back to her Texas home.

One piece, "Trade," reveals the constant sorrow of living in a war-torn country. Nye and an Irish friend are visiting Nye's 105-year-old grandmother, Sitti, in her Palestinian village. The Irish friend tells a story about her own grandmother, who sits blank in bed all day staring at the sea of the Irish coastland. The paragraph ends with Sitti turning to Nye to ask, "Do you think she'd trade places with me?"

Besides being a tireless and prolific writer with a vision to illuminate the essential humanity of misconstrued peoples, Nye is a good witness. By that I mean she is aware of the small but meaningful details of her surroundings; she's curious, and her ear is well tuned.

I called Nye in Texas five days after the New York tragedy. Her voice was assured and comforting; she sounded like the reasonable, kind friend we crave in a crisis. She was, in fact, the first person I'd spoken to since September 11 who didn't seem either reactive or completely overwhelmed. Nye said, "I had a premonition that something was coming. I've felt it for weeks." Nye closely watches the turmoil in the Middle East. She subscribes to several list servers and watches international news. Several weeks ago, when Yasser Arafat's office was bombed, Nye remembers a person from a radical group attesting, "Now the world will see what it has never seen before." Those words unhinged her. She waited in dread.

"I worry," Nye said, "that in my lifetime, I will never see Arabs respected again." She worries also that radical terrorists are using the incident as a prompt and that, subsequently, the net of blame for the terrorist attacks will be cast too broadly. "Our anger should be toward fanatics," Nye says. "They kill people outrageously and cast a huge shadow. They don't care about peace-loving Arabs when they strike."

On September 11, she was stranded after teaching in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had to take a Greyhound bus home. Greyhound was in paranoid chaos, as if it was the next terrorist target. For the first leg of the trip, Nye sat next to a prisoner just released from a two-year jail term for assault. The man was ecstatic with hope for a redeemed life; he hadn't heard about the tragedy. Nye couldn't shatter the man's illusion, but in the encounter she found a metaphor for the country's betrayed awakening.

A few days later, still thinking about her seatmate on the bus, Nye wrote a poem that ends: "Quinn take it easy/Peace is rough."

Naomi Shihab Nye will read with Sherman Alexie on Friday, October 5 at 8 p.m., kicking off Annual Inquiry 2000: Maps at the Richard Hugo House.