My mother’s hands were made of wool,
or of silk that carried moisture like a seed,
unlike the white coating of palm trees,
the solemn snares of thorns and thistles,
nor the glass covering of the naked sky,
not the steely stones of my father’s body,
whose bones still lay in the valley of Bacca.
Her hands were not from a pile of ashes
which decorated my father’s ageing eyes,
the burnt the flesh of his ancestors,
but from a package of soft tissues,
the witness of things that don’t burn,
from burning dreams, the buried furnace
of all things that grow without a body.
How they grew to be steel and iron,
which no storm could bend, no bullets pierce,
has never been told to us in the family legend.
Yet her soft, gentle hands carried mountains
and made the grass disappear into the sky.
Rocks fell on them, and they were flowers;
needles stick them into wads of wool.
They have cradled stony hills into lullabies.
When she carried my father, they were a cross,
and a splendour which she showed to the sky,
that even the wind might become ribbons
and fall on them with softer caresses.
When she carried my eldest sister,
my mother’s hands were leather leaves,
the sun had shone on these surfaces,
and they were light and hard and tender.
When she carried me, they were like urns,
Carrying the old and the past into the future,
the receptacle of a seed growing into a flower,
pleading that these urns could be living bodies,
not the reservoir of the dead and undead,
but the fountain of blood seeping into ash,
quickening it, bringing it back to life.
I wonder how mosquitoes survived the annihilation
which made my mother’s hands drop like bombs,
like life embodying death, seed embodying harvest,
like sorrow embodying joy, pain pouring out of pleasure.
My mother’s hands had an uncanny, unhinged duty,
of gathering tears in a bottle for blessing,
not the curses to turn our bodies into ash,
of squashing squalor with a subtle slide,
pinning pain to a pining pole in the planet
that holds the spindle to the needy.
My mother built our house with her bare hands,
and the sky opened its belly for a swim,
for the blessing of her hands to slay the dragons
lurking beneath the grass of our garden.
When she became old, her hands were withered,
though whatever she touched turned gold,
including those things she didn’t touch,
but close to where her breath flew by,
where the blood of her hands dropped on their veins.
Or where forever their mouths opened for a kiss.
