Agoloso Presents - Atondido Stories Agoloso Presents - Mama Mada | Page 225

Mama Mada
Poem Beginning With a Line
by Eve Merriam
I am telling my hands
to be still. They do not want
to be still. My hands are grey,
they are not clean,
they long to be grey again.
There is much they have seen
and cannot speak of.
I have told them
they are beautiful
but they will not listen.
Fidgeting towards silence
is their gift, picking up objects
and placing them back again.
They will not sit
still, joined by hope or nothing
on the dials of old radios, cuttings
from newspapers, pencil-shavings
in a desk-drawer.
My hands gaze up at me with love.
I cannot look at them.
They tell me they are proud
of what I have done.
Do not be afraid, they say,
let us explain to you the truth
of your life: you are loved,
you are more than your hands.
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