How Will You Use Your Hands? Published in Consecrate/Desecrate

 

This poem and painting were created for and published in the Great Salt Lake Collaborative's Anthology: Consecrate/Desecrate in 2022. You can learn more about the Great Salt Lake Collaborative here and you can read other pieces published in Consecrate/Desecrate here.

How Will You Use Your Hands?

Small hands stack stones, clumsy yet delicate. 

Small hands splatter color on walls. 

Again and again and again 

through the fall of beasts

and the rise of industry. 

Small hands stack stones. 

 

Big hands stack bigger stones.

Big hands carve symbols. 

Again and again and again 

through the changing tides

and the eroding of years. 

Big hands stack stones. 

A pebble sleeps gently in your palm. 

 

The earth holds our creations. 

Now, it is towers that stack endlessly upon themselves

and it is poisons poured in her veins.

Still, she holds our art. 

What is the destruction of the hammer you hold? 

 

In a desert valley that lies in a tide of mountain shadows, 

a great copper mine extends a stone spiral, 

a scar of extraction.

Out of the valley and up the great lake another spiral extends, 

exposed and naked.

Stripped of its saline blanket.

The Spiral Jetty.

Spiraling like a frond of time unfurling,

a work of hands stacking stones

in a now dying lake.

Earth holds them both.

Our hands were made to stack stones. 

How Will You Use Your Hands?

Multimedia 

Francesco (Frank) Vales