Sorry to be late with your Monday poetry vitamin! I was trying yesterday to find a poem by Larry Levis to publish here, but most of his poems are very long and I couldn’t find one I really loved. So here is an old favorite by Naomi Shihab Nye that you may know. You can hear some of her other poems at the
above link. She says it is her most anthologized poem.
Making a Fist
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 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
