This past week I took a Poetry workshop with Bill Brown. It was heart wrenching but inspirational, this is the product of one of his prompts. I thought it only appropriate to share it here for #oneshotwednesday
Rough and ragged,
drywall hanging, putty stained,
patching cracks and holes,
mending the places where people dwell.
The cross shaped scar,
the ring less finger,
both evidence that God saved him once.
On my back with soft skin
brown or olive, on my white skin,
fingers laced
we are shades of one another.
Skin of the migrant worker,
native teacher,
blue collar American hands,
with Spanish dna instilling courage
grasping at equality
contending the social bullishness of
injustice, prejudice and ignorance.
Those hands built the house
where my soul dwells.
This hodge-podge,
grew as the children came,
then grew some more
house of spirit and bone.
Hands that wrote
empty-handed legacy of bull-shit
with the permission to refuse it,
and craft my own.
Dark hands of my nightmares
releasing me to
a drowning world
in the amniotic fluid
that gave birth to me.
Hands with a voice
when mouth was silent
Shh… don’t speak
just close the door.
Grandfather’s hands now,
aged yet strong,
worn but useful
wise, and disciplined
casts fishing lines and
dripping sticks of marshmallows
into the fire consuming childhood.
The bearer of
hands that uplift the children
that thrust through the
bone of his bone,
flesh of his flesh,
daughter of the wild one.
