Hands of a Poet, Hand of a Poet

Once upon a time there was a blog I created, Vagabond Poet, which after several years became for a short while Vagabond Poet Redux. Not too long after my husband Roger died in 2017, I discontinued the blog. But its still there at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com/, if you’re curious.

Then, in deep Covid era in mid-2021, I created this new blog, The Muses’ Refugia, with an expanded vision of what I wanted to write about and share.

For this installment, I’ve circled back to bring you the original “Hands of a Poet” think piece.  It reads:

This afternoon millions of people are getting psyched to watch their team charge on to Super Bowl victory, each pass landing firmly in the receiver’s ready hands.  Yay!  Or lose because the ball is fumbled and falls into the opponent’s hands. Boo, hiss!  Not for me.  I don’t even know who’s playing, and would much rather think about the miracle of the human hand and more specifically about a poet’s hands.   

Hands have been on my mind for a couple weeks now.  The above photo must have prompted a more prolonged meditation than zoom, focus, click, download, save.

On my recent Poetry Safari to Caloosahatchee Regional Park, tucked into my tent, aka Budkowsi, I experimented with a prose-poem variation on the ghazel, which is a 6th-century Arabic poetic form traditionally consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain, each line sharing the same meter.  It’s evolved since then and you’ll often see ghazals in couplets where a single word and variations on that word serve a desire for sameness and refrain.

I’ve tried several ghazals recently exploring for the first time how the form works. Last week while tucked inside my tent, I tried a variation sans couplet, but working with variations on, you might have guessed it: hands. Here’s what came of my experiment:

Ghazal by Hand 

Human beings make so much of their dexterous hands, handing

over survival to opposable thumbs, handily.

Breaker, breaker one-nine, this is Handmaid,

CB handle for a left-hander with love handles.

Let’s hand it to hand signals

of catchers to pitchers and hand codes of foreign spies handing

off secrets. They’ve been seen on the streets of New York mishandling

hands-out panhandlers living hand-to-mouth

near Wall Street. Study the artful hands

of Georgia O’Keeffe in Stieglitz’s eye; ponder Adam’s holy hand

extend to touch the hand

of God. I have it firsthand

from the Buddha’s praying hands:

Faith is a hands-on

experiment with hand-me-down

koans. So I wash my hands of hand-to-hand

cosmic combat. Handmade

peace in pieces is handed

down to me. Let’s have a show of hands,

hold hands, shake hands. Put the handwriting

on the petroglyph wall, handsome!

***

Well, it was fun for me at least.

Since then, I have turned my thoughts back to the photograph that started all this rumination on our ten wondrous digits.

The hands in the photograph belong to William Heyen.  My friend Bill.  He and his ever-delightful wife Han (short for Hannelore) had joined Roger and me for an outing into the 10,000 Islands of Everglades National Park. When the tour boat picked up speed, we held on to railing, each other, our caps, keeping eyes open for bottle-nosed dolphins (who did indeed appear) and white pelicans (a large flock of them jostled one another on a small white sandbar just on the edge of the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico). I clicked the shutter.  And the photograph featured here got lodged in my brain.

Upon further reflection, I came up with a scherzi sextet, using the short form of thirteen syllables (plus a rhyme) that Bill invented.  Here ’tis:


The Great One on Tour in the 10,000 Islands

The master poet grasps his baseball cap,

both hands, secure.

This poet holds on to his hat,

fingers splayed, firm grip.

This is the poet who keeps his head straight,

riveted.

Poet of the inner eye stares

into mangrove passes.

I behold the sun-shaded poet

behold the osprey.

Below the brim, the poet’s god

is lost in the Glades.

~~~

A challenge for your writer’s hand

Fresh today is this photograph of another poet’s hand, entitled “Bird of Paradise.”

Now it’s your turn. I hope you’ll take up the challenge:  Write a 50-word piece in any genre—flash fiction, poetry (haiku, tanka, etc. welcome), memoir—that tells the story of the photograph. Just send your 50 words (or fewer) along in the blog reply box and be sure to give me your full name as you wish it to appear; also include any credit should it be a published piece.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with!  And thanks for reading!