Hands awaken! Speak out! Answer to sacred shouts,
subterranean whispering, to stars above rooftops—
thread sunlit branches with the chattering of a thousand leaves.
If flux and urgency of confusion or death
should drawn you into the self-box--
remember when one constructed prison fell away.
However you helped this forward,
do more of the same.
Be rain-hands, laughing, steeped in earth fragrances.
Be fingers in blossom, loves innumerable, rough-cut and bedazzled—unafraid to be splayed wide open.
Be pocketed hands, released to the welcoming wind—
multiplying there in mid-air, they ride the four directions.
Be hands of smoke and of fire, descending and ascending
like ragged bird-song—effulgent, charged with surprise
and now even with mock surprise.
Start at the beginning, exactly where you are.
Not satiate with loll-lolling recede wave’s tide,
not retreated back and back,
until grown utterly intellectual and lumpish!
Now, Human Being—you come awake also!
Sweep furnishings from your table.
Upend the table lawlessly.
Bring the muscular, fleshy, feminine to the masculine and muscular.
Likewise, bring the masculine to feminine. Bring friend to enemy,
estranged neighbor to confidante.
In a dance of pressing hands,
let subtle conversation play.
Ring all the tiny bells.
Stir the King and Queen of Remembrance.
In over-arching restraint, hold back one iota, so pure notes sound—
bring sunburst, sphere and harmony.
Make your entire body a listening board
forming therein—tender shapes around which love
seed unfolds its infinite spaces and then…
Spring awake! All to better dreaming
where your faith is undashed, not with this dying.
O, hear me now! Hands, every which one of you,
with every human—never again sleep,
never abandon!