Day 26
Love Poem
by Ingrid
This prompt is meant to be playful: Write a love poem from your right hand to your left hand. Or, from your left hand to your right hand. What does one hand do for you that the other cannot? Vice Versa? Look at the appearance, skin, color, nails, scars, and write about it. Which one is dominant?
by Ingrid
This prompt is meant to be playful: Write a love poem from your right hand to your left hand. Or, from your left hand to your right hand. What does one hand do for you that the other cannot? Vice Versa? Look at the appearance, skin, color, nails, scars, and write about it. Which one is dominant?
A HAND
By Jane Hirshfield
A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.
Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.
A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.
Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink.
The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.
A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.
Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.
MY FATHER'S LEFT HAND
By David Bottoms
Sometimes my old man’s hand flutters over his knee, flaps
in crazy circles, and falls back to his leg.
Sometimes it leans for an hour on that bony ledge.
And sometimes when my old man tries to speak, his hand waggles in the air, chasing a word, then perches again
on the bar of his walker or the arm of a chair.
Sometimes when evening closes down his window and rain
blackens into ice on the sill, it trembles like a sparrow in a storm.
Then full dark falls, and it trembles less, and less, until it’s still.
in crazy circles, and falls back to his leg.
Sometimes it leans for an hour on that bony ledge.
And sometimes when my old man tries to speak, his hand waggles in the air, chasing a word, then perches again
on the bar of his walker or the arm of a chair.
Sometimes when evening closes down his window and rain
blackens into ice on the sill, it trembles like a sparrow in a storm.
Then full dark falls, and it trembles less, and less, until it’s still.
