Making A Fist

We forget that we are all dead men conversing wtih 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

Around the holidays it is most easy to miss those we have lost.  There absence at a family get-together or office party or another tradition stings.  I love this poem because it shows a mother's ability to comfort her child about death, the most mysterious phenomenon of life.  With a simple answer, she lets her child see the simplicity of the circle of life, and it is not so scary.  My mother comforts me when I miss someone who has passed in the same, simple way, making me still a child.