Monday, March 18, 2013

Still Fighting It

We lost some good ones over the last week and the weekend. I wanted to have something to say about it, but I don't.

It's too sad.

Instead, I will let the below speak for me:

Making a Fist

By Naomi Shihab Nye 

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.
 
 
 
 


(or you can view it here )


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