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 )