Hi Friends, Happy 2024!
This poem was kindly published by Rhianna Levi and Black Pear Press last year in their life's wonders anthology.
Fists
Our fists side-by-side, palm-side down,
(four squares with turrets for knuckles),
remind me of our overlapping genes.
Your fists are perfect square,
adipose-smooth.
My fists are more imperfect,
scored with blue veins.
The similarity of our fists, though, is clear.
I want to see your DNA, learn its sequences,
immerse myself in its aqueous order.
So, I look at your fists.
So, that I can remember you
(the biological you)
on days when you are not physically here.
But, heavy cloud surrounds me, a delightful corpus.
There is so much more to you than fists.
Climbing out of your biology,
your nucleotides,
is your soul and, concurrently, your soul envelops your cells.
Your soul is beautiful,
gentle like Clementia.
Your fists don’t throw punches,
they are only memorials to your existence here,
the merest heat
becoming parcels of love.
Our fists side-by-side, palm-side down,
our moment in time,
on Earth. Unearthing identity.
--
Thanks for reading!
Stephen