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.
This poem really spoke to me with its questions. A question that every child has and every adult has even more...the "if" makes me smile. As the quote precedes, we already are dying. There no longer is an if. How do we know when we are going to die...
ReplyDeleteThe proverbial "FIST" mother says? Being in the industry I am in so many people are just too lazy to make a fist anymore...even when they have the life inside them to do so :( the will to make a fist, the strength, the hope, etc. So many comparisons can be made here.
Did you link the quote with the poem? Where did you find this one?
It was with it. It is appropriate to the poem, isn't it? I love that short prologue. It answers the child's question on another level that she wasn't intending. How do you know IF you're going to die?" You're living and you have the ability to think about death.
Delete"Still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions." We learn so much in life, but the childish questions can still be the ones that torment or just keep us thinking the most.
This peom really goes well with the poem "What the Living Do." This is one of the things the living do. And those who don't ask questions and wonder, and love to connect with Mr. Baca, don't live.
You chose this author more than once this month. What interested you most about her?
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Shihab_Nye
She doesn't sound white
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