"Such hands could turn the unborn child rightways"

Illustrations from Vincenzo Requeno's Discovery of Chironomia (1797)

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Twenty-One Love Poems [Poem VI]

by Adrienne Rich (1929 –2012)

Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—
only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands
I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,
handling power-tools or steering-wheel
or touching a human face. . . . Such hands could turn
the unborn child rightways in the birth canal
or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship
through icebergs, or piece together
the fine, needle-like sherds of a great krater-cup
bearing on its sides
figures of ecstatic women striding
to the sibyl’s den or the Eleusinian cave—
such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence
with such restraint, with such a grasp
of the range and limits of violence
that violence ever after would be obsolete.

from “Twenty-One Love Poems,” by Adrienne Rich, from The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 by Adrienne Rich. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978.

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Creative Invitation

Your mother runs her fingers through your hair, gently taking all the strands between the negative spaces of her hands and all is right with the world—how does it feel to share the same rights and blessings of the hands that cut the fresh produce, smoothened rough surfaces, and healed?

Write a letter to your mother of choice—in your own words, tell them how they had healed you then and now.