Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
Blind Gods, Human Braille
by Jessica D. Hand | ns 69
In the beginning, the earth was flat.
Blind gods sat between the cushions of galaxies,
palming the earth's smooth surface.
Dust covered everything.
The world was a forgotten chore.
The gods wanted to fill this blank page of a planet.
They raised the dust into arms and legs,
sexes and heads. They bled their blood
into human bodies, and people started to move.
Every movement was a new word.
The movement of Eve's mouth pressing
into her first apple was an entire sentence:
Thank you for choice.
Every flick of Leonardo's painting hand said
I am awed to be alive.
The inward pull of Gandhi's hungry flesh
was courage.
My daughter Sarah, my two year old,
loves to swim naked.
She moves like freedom.
Mrs. Smith from 808 Main Circle
walks her dog every night at seven,
reads the Bible, pays taxes early.
Her body feels like duty.
I think of Brian in Iraq.
He was only a syllable in the word
repetition.
When American bombs shook the skies,
the gods were at a loss.
They couldn't cross the words
sudden and planned.
In the midst of all this, we turn to each other,
memorizing every movement.
We believe in the polytheism of our fingers,
which are also blind gods, reading raised flesh,
understanding the translation.
The gods feel pain burst all over the world
and wonder at the movements of joy.
While we made love under stars,
the scar of sun in an Iraqi sky
could not warm Brian's cooling corpse.
To the gods, wars burn like books.
Because death is still
among a world of movement,
the gods do not understand.
They keep searching for all the lost words.
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