Making a Fist- Poem (classwork grade)

  • Due Oct 26, 2021 at 11:59pm
  • Points 8
  • Questions 8
  • Time Limit None

Instructions

This is a classwork grade, not a quiz grade.  Read the poem and respond to the questions.  

    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.
Notes
1. Tampico is a city and port in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist” from Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry. Copyright © 1988 by University of Utah Press. Reprinted by permission of Naomi Shihab Nye.
Naomi Shihab Nye was born to an American mother and a Palestinian father in 1952. Though based in Texas, she has traveled the world and refers to herself as a “wandering poet.” In the following 1988 poem, a young child has an epiphany during one such travel.

As you read, take notes on the way the poet develops the theme through alliteration and figurative language.

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