Hands...
hold our past
as we turn our memories
in our fingers,
stroking the pad of our thumb
along the rim of time.
Hands...
we use to push our love across the tables of our lives
so that others may come to know
things lying in the heart-depths of our soul.
With hands...
we grip the anger unexpressed,
white-knuckled with the fierceness of our pain.
With hands...
we commit our sins,
too late pulling back our fist into the rain.
Our hands...
hold the sparkling prisms of our multiplicity
up to the flaming light
that the beauty of its cut heart
might leave the darkness and be seen.
Hands...
to hold the implements of our trade,
that we may use them wisely,
offering them in the service that we know.
Hands...
to play the music that we hear,
the rhythms flowing in our surging veins,
the tapping of eternity on the shoulders of our mind.
Hands...
to ease our throbbing soul
when wounds have found their way
and made us weary with the lengthy battle of the day.
Hands...
giving and receiving
the pleasure of another's touch, another's flesh,
a conduit wherethrough the flow of love begins.
Hands...
searching for the things once lost
that we have covered carefully
with red-brocaded altar cloths
to keep them safe away.
Hands...
to press against our being
when the world o'erflows its banks
and too much of life comes splashing 'gainst our door.
Hands...
experienced, knowing where to look
where to find
the things required of us
Hands...
wise enough to know
when to reach for other things
beyond our open palm.
Hands...
to make it stop...
to say that we are done
and need you home again snug in our heart and soul.
And when our hands have struck
against unyielding rocks
And find themselves tied tight,
no longer free...
But shackled to the walls,
with chains unyielding
And we are forced in places where there are only swords
and sand
and pain
We curl our fingers upwards,
veiled in clinging dust,
so their emptiness
does not cost us everything...
and more.
And we devise some means...
we think...
To wash it all away...
the dust
the blood
the tears
Or we scrape at it,
bleeding down our arm,
that it might be gone...
as though it never were.
But we are marked,
and our hands reveal the slice,
struck clean across
by wounds inflicted on our soul.
But, yet, our hands cling to our treasures
despite the filth and mire
And it is only where our memories linger
that we can see the days
of bright wholeness
when we used them free of care.
But hands...
have a way, they do,
of finding once again
all that was lost,
and our fingers feel it still,
our treasure,
through the supple folds of leather worn with age.
Hands lift
to our waiting lips
what had been lost to us,
now found,
now blessed by candlelight,
anointed by our kiss.
It takes a lot of blood
for hands to find their way,
to reach with certain movement
toward the massive, long-sought gate,
to have the final strength
for that final push.
Then...
other hands...
it must be so,
come and close our eyes,
biding us godspeed
into the wind
to other, distant shores.
But...
it is all in quiet triumph
that hands find their final way,
come finger-fluttering across the grain heads
of our harvest day.
And know the wheat is ripe,
And know all that can be known
of the ways of life...
...and death...
when hands arrive back home.
Jo Anzalone
A HUG... (SIMILAR TO "HANDS")
EYES... ALSO SIMILAR but with almost 100 pictures
FEET... with 40 pictures
A MOUTH... with 52 pictures