The Hand

In South Africa, a white aristocrat grabs
the hand of an elderly black man
sitting in the dirt on the edge
of a lush crop. The white man
picks the black man’s hand up
as if it were a self-serve gasoline nozzle,
pulls it toward a reporter
and mechanically squeezes the wrist
to spread wide the thick callused fingers
and palm. The white man holds his own hand
open side-by-side. Do you see
the difference? he asks. What
does his hand look like to you? How
can you say we are the same?

Do you see the difference? he asks again,
the reporter stunned by what he is hearing,
while the black man sits inanimate,
his working cowboy hand
filling the camera’s close-up lens
with a landscape of canyons,
coulees and arroyos, buttes and mesas, mountains
and plains the black man might have ridden,
hands shaped by pistol grip, lariat, and reins,

had he been born of another geography
and time—just another wind-burned hand
of a cavvy man, sinew and knuckle,
flesh and blood, pocked, porous, scarred,
and dark as lathered latigo. The hand
alongside the aristocrat’s
tissue-paper appendage always reaching to take
even another man’s hand, and own it,
and hold it open, because he knows the fist
is as big as a man’s heart
and this is the difference he fears.

Collisions of Reckless Love CDs are available from the Western Folklife Center (phone 775-738-7508, ext 2) and CD Baby.

© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.