Your hands.
The ones that you are holding together
In prayer or desperation or hope,
The ones with the tiny scar
You carried since that bicycle accident
All those years before.
The ones that today may shake with worry
Or sit still from the gravity of headlines.
Those hands, your hands.
There is something to remember—
A needful thing to remember—
About your hands,
That they are the same hands that
Petted the cool, slick back of a kitten
On its first day.
The same ones
That flattened the crumpled edges
Of a construction paper heart
After the glue came unstuck.
The same hands that, just last night,
Pulled your family’s patchwork under
The chin of your youngest as you whispered,
“It’s going to be OK,” and wanted it to be so.
The same hands that offered,
In the simplest gesture of gift giving,
Tissue to a stranger
Who, tears streaking her face,
Asked “Why? Why?”
Addressed not to you but to God,
Asked of a world
Whose glue has come unstuck.
They are the same hands that give
The world its most needful thing.
You know its most needful thing.
You know because your hands have always given it,
Always offered, or tried to offer, the kindest touch
Exactly when it was hoped for.
And you know nothing can change that, right?
Nothing can take away the brilliant
Beautiful power of the hands
God gave you, not to pull a trigger,
But to proclaim the softness of the world.
Nothing can annul the kindness of your touch.
There is power in your hands,
The power of a kindness that beckons
To remake the world, always,
As though this were its first day.