When does one move from writing greeting card verse for a girlfriend, to writing poetry for pleasure and craft? For me, it was in a small Creative Writing class at Denver Seminary in 1985 with Dr. Bruce Shelley, my favorite professor and a respected author. I humbly put my still latent wordy aspirations of someday becoming a so-called “creative writer” under his influence. One assignment I handed in was more prosetry than poetry, more seed than sapling, a short prosaic exploration of the double entendre embedded in the words, “the hands of God.” Dr. Shelley inscribed my single sheet of paper, printed from my Apple IIe with but one paltry paragraph of words, with a strong “A” in red pen, and I kept writing. Thirty-something years later, having become a creative writer, I found the paper with its simple words in a dusty old box of seminary files. As I read them again, I felt that the seed I had entrusted to Dr. Shelley needed more light and life. The poem below grew into a sapling from the words planted in that class.
THE HANDS OF GOD
They are the hands of God. These hands.
Just common, corporeal stuff. But mine.
These uncommon wonders of God’s design.
He put himself into my hands.
His life is in my hands.
His strength in tight, white-knuckled grasp.
His love in healing, blood-warmed caress.
His wrath in tense, fists-formed to judge.
His mercy in tender, skin-sensing touch.
His humanity, in fingers of embracing care.
His divinity, in palms lifted open in prayer.
His goodness, in fruits of earth in hand.
His beauty, in hints of a heavenly dance.
His life is in my hands. His life.
In these fragile, skin-wrapped members,
Bone and blood, muscle and tendon.
In these mortal, decaying appendages,
He lives and moves, his life transcending
The calloused sins, the dirt and dearth
The grip on things that have no worth
The striking pain, the shame and guilt
The failings only grace can heal.
His life is in my hands. My hands.
Grabbing, grasping, reaching, longing.
Helping, holding, bleeding, mourning.
Opening, closing, taking, giving.
Growing, aging, dying, living.
My hands are his to use, to move.
To do his work, to be his love.
To offer to a wanting world
His light and life, his way and word.
They are, indeed, the hands of God.
These are the hands of God.
(c) 2019 Clay Clarkson