Naomi Shihab Nye tells about discovering poetry at age six, sharing poetry with young people, and how she came to write "The Lost Parrot."

I started to read poetry at age six, possibly as a refuge from our insulting first-grade textbook—Come, Jane, come. Look, Jane, look. I thought, "Were there ever duller people in the world? You have to tell them to look at things? Why weren't they looking to begin with?"

Poets I loved early on: Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson (very mysterious), William Blake (my second-grade teacher urged us to memorize his "Songs of Innocence"), Walter de la Mare, Rachel Field, Rabindranath Tagore.

I started to write poetry then too, and I sent my first poems to children's magazines by age seven. Wee Wisdom, a magazine that still exists, published the first one about my cat Cricket. I got to read the poem over the school intercom, which seemed very space-age in those days.

You could write about anything, which seemed fabulous to me. The field was rich and wide open. Actually, the process of writing was much more exciting than the moment of seeing something in print. Writing was another way of thinking, but better, because your thoughts unfolded right there in front of you, and you could go back to them. Often, writing also felt like another kind of friend—a patient companion—you could tell anything to. It would not betray or abandon you.

After college, I worked as a poet-in-the-schools, visiting schools all over my city and state, encouraging students to explore the material of their own lives through words.

"The Lost Parrot" was written for a real boy named Carlos in San Antonio (a third-grader) after I had been working with children and their writing for a few years. A "dream-poem" is a poem in which a writer follows images that first come to him or her through dreaming—whether while sleeping or during a wakeful state. These can be kooky things, impossible things, wished-for things. (Poets think daydreaming is very important.)

I urged students not to write that they had woken up in the last line. "Stay in the dream," I said. I urged them to experiment with as many images as they could, describing them so readers could picture them too.

Carlos, however, had only one image and one subject, as the poem suggests.

I couldn't stop thinking of him after I left his classroom. I kept looking for his parrot in the trees. Just recently a woman sent me a poem in which she says she found his parrot and raised it for years. I just wish we could find him to tell him.