Poem in my Pocket: "Making a Fist"

More about this lovely poet
and other poem here

*Contrite expression*

          Yesterday was Poem in my Pocket Day and I was so excited about book drops and bookshelves that I forgot to carry around and give my poem away.

          So, I'm doing it today (for those of you who also forgot...wanna do it with me?).

          Here's my poem:

Making A Fist

Naomi Shihab Nye

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.