Sometimes my hands curl up,
and other times, they open.
Then I feel the air;
My fingers relax.
I touch your hand;
uncurl it and press it to mine.
Palm on palm, it’s no secret
that palms connect to hearts.
In your face, I see a hint of melancholy,
I feel it in my soul..
as if there was a secret connection..
thought how I don’t know.
Somehow, touching, we create another soul,
Neither you nor I, but we……
Touching, need to be physical..
We know how a story can affect us that way.
What a gift to know we have touched someone…
In the heart.’s. most tender space.The place of love.
Both true and false, my palm is lonely.
Then I feel the caress of summer air.
To touch is to be touched
as one soul opens to another…
Vulnerable, human, loving,
Painful and illusory,like those dreams of childhood.
Now I go, first gripping, then loosening our hands.
Goodbye, we say. Goodbye
Day: May 11, 2019
Not by human hands
Caressed by light yet not by human hands
Stroked by colour, touched by sun and moon
The lonely person cannot understand
We want the feel of flesh, the words so kind
Enveloped in our coat of dogged gloom
Caressed by light yet not by human hands
Fixed on one who elsewhere is deployed
We fail to notice as our hate consumes
The lonely person will not understand
As our mind with misery is crammed
We do not check the facts, careering on
Indifferent to the light, or humankind
Colourless emotions fake our lines
Sharing words and sentences is doomed
The lonely person could well understand
In the darkness of the human mind
Caressed by none but God, we lose the tune
The lonely feel dismembered and then damned
If we feel despair and breakdown looms
Will we weed out love and bring down ruin
Caressed by light yet not by human hands
The lonely person wills that she withstands
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Pat Barker in the Paris Review
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7290/pat-barker-the-art-of-fiction-no-243-pat-barker
BARKER
Well, you see, this is what we have in common with the Bronze Age or World War I. We have these bodies that have actually not evolved during that time, as far as we know. The truth of the body is for me the most important route into the historical past, and into the mythic past as well. You have five senses—well, more than five, at least six because you have this sense of gravity, of where your body is in space—but that’s all you’ve got as a writer. There is literally almost nothing else. The whole thing rests on this incredibly simple foundation.
How my heart sings 