April 27, 2021: Holding Hands

                Holding Hands

 

Your hand –

Only a hand

Until you touch

Me.

 

If it were only your hand

  It would only be a hand –

If it were only your body,

  It would only be a thing.

 

If it were not intentional,

But also unintentional,

It would not be from the heart.

You touched my love.

Joints, muscles

My fragile love –

Bone, skin

With your hands

Connecting tissue

Your fragile hands

Nerves

Which are precious to me

Blood vessels

Because they are fragile

Hair follicles

And yours.

 

Your hands could never be

More precious

For the rings and bracelets of a queen,

And a statue of precious stones

A thousand years old

Could never be

More valuable to me.

 

Your hands,

Only hands,

Until you held me

 

In your gentle hands.

April 27, 2021: Valediction, Forbidding Mourning by John Donne, In Harvard Classics, vol. 41, page 304

Valediction, Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go;
While some of their sad friends do say,
Now his breath goes, and some say, No;

So let us melt, and make no noise,
no tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears
Men reckon what it did and meant'
But trepidations of the spheres,
Though greater far, are innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence; for that it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so far refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Careless, eyes, lips and hands to miss,

-- Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
like th' other foot obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circles just,
And makes me end where I begun.