It is alarming to sit in a chair,
cup your hands and ask,
what are my fingers holding?
Empty air?
The gesture of a beggar?
Expectation?
What I am holding are pictures,
voices from caves and houses,
the resonance of the world’s beginning,
a wave that forgot the others
and fell to the bottom of the sea,
a memory,
unrecorded cherries,
children,
a life ending.
All there in my hands.
In the cup formed by my starving fingers.
My hands asking to be fed,
to see the lilacs of another age,
the journey of a ship lost in storms.
Perhaps someone will invent the machine
that shows all the messages,
TV pictures,
lost lives,
voices from a thousand radios,
angels visiting
and stroking our hair,
trying to tell us,
we are loved,
not hated,
pitied,
not envied.
Children who live in a dream,
all there in the cup of my hands,
sitting in a chair,
wondering at the hunger inside me
that never leaves,
and wishing,
I were not an old man
lost in childhood.