
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Episode #35
Literary analysis of two poems, "Making a Fist" and "The Flying Cat" by Naomi Shihab Nye. Recommended for high school.
Analysis focuses on the use of humor, speaker/point of view, and theme.
CW: one poem is about death, the other is about pets dying; the discussion reflects both themes.
#11 in the Feminist Justice series
The poems are short, so I'm going to put the full text of both here. But also, links.
Making a Fist: Making a Fist by Naomi Shihab Nye | Poetry Foundation
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.
The Flying Cat: Quia - Poem by Naomi Shihab Nye -- The Flying Cat
The Flying Cat
5
11 ratings
Episode #35
Literary analysis of two poems, "Making a Fist" and "The Flying Cat" by Naomi Shihab Nye. Recommended for high school.
Analysis focuses on the use of humor, speaker/point of view, and theme.
CW: one poem is about death, the other is about pets dying; the discussion reflects both themes.
#11 in the Feminist Justice series
The poems are short, so I'm going to put the full text of both here. But also, links.
Making a Fist: Making a Fist by Naomi Shihab Nye | Poetry Foundation
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.
The Flying Cat: Quia - Poem by Naomi Shihab Nye -- The Flying Cat
The Flying Cat