Famous By Naomi Shihab Nye Analysis

Seldom in my night dreams do I discern any real relation to my daily, waking life. So I am surprised that my final waking this morning came as a result of a poetry dream, of all things. There I was, walking along a sidewalk and I came upon that part of a front yard where the house stands close enough to the street that the front yard is narrow, in this case maybe just 15 feet from sidewalk to structure. Pine trees provided some shade with one in particular that offered a wide swath of shade extending on over to the front of the foremost room with its large bay picture window. Likely this was a dining room, giving those in the room a broad, full view of the street and the neighborhood. The lawn was fabulous, lush. It was Kentucky bluegrass, which I knew because that was the kind of lawn I had spent more than a few hours caring for in my youth. You see, my father was not big on grounding children. He preferred a slightly more self-interested tack. He spared himself yard chores by assigning misbehaving kids to weed the vegetable gardens or to pull invasive Bermuda grass from the lawn. My intimacy with the lawn, its origins notwithstanding, established a lasting …show more content…
I should also mention that when Nye visited the student-run Sophomore Literary Festival I was part of (1977), I was her assigned escort for several days, though in reality that was not much necessary given that the director of the festival my year was John Phillip Santos (soon to be the first Hispanic Rhodes Scholar) who was from San Antonio and was therefore already her friend. She was lovely, young, gracious, nice, and not yet very famous, though I might add, of course, that even the least known poem by the most unpublished poet ever must surely be famous to its