Your Hands

Lucas Hergert

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.