Poet and novelist Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952 to an American mother and a Palestinian father. She lived in Jordan and Jerusalem before settling in San Antonio, Texas. Nye often writes of her experiences as an Arab American woman and the ways people navigate cross-cultural differences. In this post-9/11 prose poem set in an airport, the Arab American narrator befriends an older Palestinian woman whose inability to communicate with those around her has left her weeping and frightened. Able to speak a little halting Arabic, the narrator becomes this woman’s connection both to their shared Palestinian community and the impromptu English-speaking one that forms around them at the gate. As the mood of the weary travelers changes, the narrator concludes, "This is the world I want to live in." Is the Palestinian woman’s fear and confusion something you recognize? What about the sense of kinship that forms among the strangers at the gate? Is the "shared world" the poem describes the world that we live in now, or an ideal?