Ash Wednesday

Making a Fist

By Naomi Shihab Nye b. 1952

We forget that we are all dead men conversing wtih 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.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist” from Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry. Copyright © 1988 by University of Utah Press. Reprinted at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241028

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We clutch so hard at life, attempting some sense of control in the face of our own finitude. We clench our fists. We numb our senses. We deny our mortality in a million different ways.

But today - Ash Wednesday - we let go. We stop clenching and clutching. We acknowledge that we will die.

We fall back against the earth and realize that we are still held. That we can rely upon gravity and the embrace of love.

The ashes smeared across our foreheads mark our mortal limits, which are exactly the places we are open to Love.

During this Lenten time, these 40 days of fasting and contemplation, I invite you simply to unclench your fist.

Not to give something up in an ascetic exercise of rigid control, but rather to let go.

What are you holding that is preventing your hands from cupping the gifts of love and beauty?

Let it go.

Pick up a handful of soft earth and let it slip through your fingers. Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.

Let it go.

Hold your hands open, fragile, soft - ready to receive.

Let go.