Tag: naomi shihab nye

Airport poems

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

airportAs many of us will be on planes during this season, I thought I’d include two poems about airports, each named for the gate where it was inspired. Next time your flight is delayed, you can bring this up and pass a little time.

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped Continue reading “Airport poems” →

A day late again

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

NaomiShihabNye_NewBioImage_Credit-BrianPalmerSorry to be late with your Monday poetry vitamin! I was trying yesterday to find a poem by Larry Levis to publish here, but most of his poems are very long and I couldn’t find one I really loved. So here is an old favorite by Naomi Shihab Nye that you may know. You can hear some of her other poems at the
above link.  She says it is her most anthologized poem.

Making a Fist

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 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.

Naomi Shihab Nye