MAKING A FIST: Naomi Shihab Nye

Today this poem, from the Poetry Foundation website. Read more poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, and about her life and work, there.

Making a Fist

    We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

                                                                  —Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist” from Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry. Copyright © 1988 University of Utah Press. 

Image by Nina Tara, courtesy of Red Edge Images.