Making A Fist / Naomi Shihab Nye

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.