“This / is the world I want to live in. The shared world.”
The 2025 NPM poster features lines from “Gate A-4”, a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, as well as artwork by New York Times-bestselling author and illustrator Christy Mandin. “Gate A-4” is a poem which has always resonated – because I used to love the swirl of humanity in airports, all the people-watching and the excitement of going. This was, of course, when I was in my twenties and still new to air travel, still believing in the public transportation contract of paying-to-ride, before a world where people beat a man and dragged him off a plane because they’d overbooked and wanted his seat for someone else. Post 2001, I saw air travel’s underbelly – a world wherein adults sometimes wept silently, frightened, frustrated by a language barrier and exiled from all they knew. I had the …experience of flying aboard a USAID flight where I put on the seat belts of other adults and a woman with a tiny infant because the flight attendant talked at them – and there was no translator. It was literally – for it was a flight out of Miami – a steaming hot mess. A toilets backed-up-and-overflowing – people airsick and vomiting – no AC on the whole flight – grit-your-teeth-and-endure hot mess, from Miami to Minnesota. I prayed those people found a home where they could be clean and fed and free of the wailing bewilderment they seemed mired in that day.
Suffice it to say I can almost feel the frustration of the gate attendant, the wary, xenophobic cringing of the other passengers at all that… foreign emotion, and the bleak despair of the woman on the floor wailing. Naomi Shihab Nye’s act of mercy and humanity made so many people’s lives better in that two hour wait for the next flight, but it is the final lines of the poem, rather than the two that the American Academy of Poets highlighted for this month that make me tear up and hold my breath: “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”
Those last two sentences always make me want to whisper, “Really? Do you promise?”
Yes. Not everything is lost: because everyone who is loved is found.
Not everything is lost: because we have it within us to be maps.
Not everything is lost: because not everything we lose is a loss.
Not everything is lost: because we can find beauty and meaning in remnants.
I don’t know what’s going to come out of me for National Poetry Month, but I will be in conversation with this, and have settled on this as my theme – and my hope. “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”
“Not everything is lost.” It’s true. It’s got to be true. Not everything, not all the time – and we will find ourselves again.