Consider the Hands

 

Consider the Hands that Write this Letter

BY ARACELIS GIRMAY

after Marina Wilson

Consider the hands

that write this letter.

Left palm pressed flat against paper,

as we have done before, over my heart,

in peace or reverence to the sea,

some beautiful thing

I saw once, felt once: snow falling

like rice flung from the giants' wedding,

or strangest of strange birds. & consider, then,

the right hand, & how it is a fist,

within which a sharpened utensil,

similar to the way I've held a spade,

the horse's reins, loping, the very fists

I've seen from roads through Limay & Estelí.

For years, I have come to sit this way:

one hand open, one hand closed,

like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up;

food will come from that farming.

Or, yes, it is like the way I've danced

with my left hand opened around a shoulder,

my right hand closed inside

of another hand. & how I pray,

I pray for this to be my way: sweet

work alluded to in the body's position to its paper:

left hand, right hand

like an open eye, an eye closed:

one hand flat against the trapdoor,

the other hand knocking, knocking.

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In some ways this poem is the antidote to “the right hand knows not what the left hand is doing”. It certainly suggests that both hands are relevant, important, and worth paying attention to, not to mention all aspects of the body. I wonder how often, if ever we even think about, much less realize, what the non-active part of our bodies is doing or feeling. I feel an invitation to sharpen my intentionality or more appropriately to expand its gaze.

How often do we pause and ask ourselves what are we missing? in ourselves? even the most taken for granted things might be forming us or informing us. 

I am reminded now of Mary Oliver and her instructions for praying: “patch/a few words together and don’t try/to make them elaborate”…notice “a silence in which / another voice may speak.”

Notice a silence in which another hand might speak…might convey the punctuation to the prayer or poem or letter. Might convey complementary meaning which makes the written or spoken words dance or sing in a more complete dimension than if alone.

So what of that other hand. We often assume it is the mirror image lying dormant or non-dominant, but it too has a life. It too conveys something in the moment.

I am thinking now of those who have some paralysis or arthritis or injury or permutation. I am watching, like the poet, a young child, use his “other” hand to steady the paper with a fist instead of the missing fingers. His intentionality is pervasive and creative, never assumed.

By thinking about what we don’t often think about, by turning the prism ever so slightly, we capture otherwise gifts which were lost in the numbness. We heighten our gratitude and wonder.

Both Girmay and Oliver, and so many others, encourage the sacred awareness that we are, all of us and every part of us, fearfully and wonderfully made. That is a prayer worth praying.