Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.
Tayve Neese: Only Her Buried Hand Rises
from photograph of Darfur genocide, 2006
From soil, the wrist and fingers are not bloom and stamen,
although the child that first found the rising tarsals
thought them something for picking.
This is not the hand of Donatello’s Magdalen,
although the angle of thumb and forefinger suggest it.
This is not Michaelangelo’s hand of the Sistine Chapel.
What angels were ever here?
This is not the hand of Fatima
with its wide eye open at center palm
able to repel the fire.
This is not the hand I will hold in mine
our flesh speaking mother to mother,
knuckles telling how they kept daughters
suspended at breast, how fingertips rolled toes,
new bones as prayer beads.
Copyright Tayve Neese. From Blood to Fruit (David Robert Books, 2015)
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Beautiful and devastating.
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Yes, it is.
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Postscript: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hamsa/
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Thank you, Maura.
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Thank you
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This is the first poem I read today, and it struck me as not only beautifully crafted, a respectful elegy for this dead woman, but especially powerful coming as it does at Halloween, which makes a strange joke of death and suffering, and at a time when thousands have died in a hateful war in Israel and Gaza. Thank you, Tayve, and VP.
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Very perceptive, Maura. Thank you!
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