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

Making a Fist

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



Never, in all your career of worrying, did you imagine

What worries could occur concerning the flying cat.

You are traveling to a distant city.

The cat must travel in a small box with holes.



Will the baggage compartment be pressurized?

Will a soldier's footlocker fall on the cat during take-off?

Will the cat freeze?



You ask these questions one by one, in different voices

over the phone. Sometimes you get an answer,

sometimes a click.

Now it's affecting everything you do.

At dinner you feel nauseous, like you're swallowing

at twenty thousand feet.

In dreams you wave fish-heads, but the cat has grown propellers,

the cat is spinning out of sight!



Will he faint when the plane lands?

Is the baggage compartment soundproofed?

Will the cat go deaf?

"Ma'am, if the cabin weren't pressurized, your cat would explode."

And spoken in a droll impersonal tone, as if

the explosion of cats were another statistic!



Hugging the cat before departure, you realize again

the private language of pain. He purrs. He trusts you.

He knows little of planets or satellites,

black holes in space or the weightless rise of fear.



by Naomi Shihab Nye