Hands and Railroads and Rage
. . . until lives truly matter
Listen along as I read it here.
I’ve been thinking about hands
Singing about hands
So many things to do with them
Play with them
Pray with them
But some things they’ll just never understand
For my skin is light
My hands are white
As a woman, when I walk at night
I am frightened by the power of man
But not by The Man
When I say the word siren
I think of singing merfolk in the world of Odysseus
I think of the annoyance of paying a ticket
But these are nothing
What kind of world is this?
Never, at a routine traffic stop
Never, when I walk near a cop
Never do I think that I could get shot
For just being there
With these hands of mine
And we can call it white guilt
For this racist world we built
On pillars of human lives
Dried bones ground to silt
Forcing railroads underground
On top go the white
On the bottom — black and brown
This fucked up merry-go-round
That makes my brain tilt
My people had numbers written into their skin
Our railroads had train cars with dozens shoved in
They sat in their own shit
Huddled with their kin
I’m a Jew you’re Black
And that is our sin
Your holocaust is different
Drawn out in time
You are living it every day
Drinking blood for wine
My relatives were buried
In the trenches at night
Today, another Black man was killed
In broad daylight
Only decades and languages to separate their plight
When will we do better?
When will we get ourselves out of this mess?
Can we use these hands to build?
To hold?
To caress?
Can we offer a prayer
From the depths of our chests?
Can we drown out this chatter
Of those who pull down their masks
Just to tell us that all lives matter?
God forbid we gripe
About the farce, the lies, the hideous disguise
Of stars and stripes
Drawn by white forefathers
God forbid we act bothered
(Never mind that it’s written at our front door
Give me your tired, your poor)
And what of our foremothers? Our sisters? What of Ross?
Would they be at a loss?
To learn that this flag is woven
Not of freedom but of lynching rope?
Is this offensive?
I damn well hope
The first step is feeling
The second is rage
The third is turning this fire into change
So I’ll sing out across these lands of mine
I’ll play six strings with these hands of mine
I’ll offer them to brothers and sisters
As we make this climb
Through racism and grief
To reach a time of tolerance and peace
I don’t know if we’ll make it
But we have to keep trying
They say the path is the destination
The message is the call
That’s true for the white man
I’ll give you my hands
Until it’s true for us all
Jewel’s song Hands has been at the top of my playlist for the last few days. “In the end,” she says, “only kindness matters.” She also says — and this couldn’t be more important right now — “where there’s a man who has no voice, there ours shall go singing.”
