just today, some students I was talking to in a Skype class in Kuwait — how much I love the modern world, that we can do these things. - Naomi Shihab Nye

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor — those great tools of thought — and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

I've always felt there was a song right around us all the time. When people are missing that, they need to wake up. They need to find their poetry where they are.

I used to get in trouble a lot when I was a kid in elementary school for, well, what the teacher would call daydreaming. It was daydreaming, but I always felt that it was almost deeper. I remember wanting to respond and say something like, “Well, it’s not just daydreaming. I’m in a hypnotic trance, thinking about the blood inside my body right now, and all the different things it’s doing that I will never see"...that feeling of being transported by the miracle that we’re living inside of it every minute, and we often don’t even think about it.