one small hand

Is it perhaps a little early in the month to be throwing down Naomi Shihab Nye? Maybe. On the other hand, I sure am feeling some type of way about the world, these days, and she's an incredible poet for those feelings—including that time I accidentally went viral on tumblr with Gate A-4. So here's another Nye poem that fucks me up.

        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 (University of Utah Press, 1988).