With fingers that whirl and bend
in a dance, she – once he –
enacts the planting of seeds and
the upward yearn of the plants:
that swirling circle of life
Sarann her name,
growing into a healer
through her body,
the movements she makes
And later other dancers
bring other messages,
stories old as empire,
Their hands rippling like birds,
or like butterflies,
swooping and diving
Fingers made flexible – they tell me –
during childhood,
when they bend them back inside
the cleaved shells of coconuts
In a temple Sok shows me his dwindled hand,
mangled before birth
in his mother’s wounded womb
Agent Orange, he elaborates,
And then an injury from a construction site
– the only work he could get in COVID
But he smiles as he talks,
beatific
His life is a good one, has meaning:
Six much-loved kids, one adopted from an orphanage,
And a job he loves –
sharing the temples’ tales,
cracking them open for the curious like us,
spilling their Buddhist and Hindu innards,
the juicy fruit of them,
torch in one hand
– the good one -
map clutched between the stubs of the other
Those temples where, also,
music emanates from men dismembered
Prosthetics detached and
propped against a makeshift stage,
they entertain us
They don’t want to beg;
the mines were not laid by them
None of this is their fault
History has broken hands,
bodies,
buildings,
cities,
hearts
But there is breakage, too,
in that act of building anew
in nurturing
There are
hands that mill rice to make noodles for vivid green soups –
broths rich in herbs that nourish and cure
There are hands
that crack and chip
and chop and hammer and split so that
things can be be woven and moulded, created:
dishes, boxes, fishes carved from wood, jewellery,
mats made of water hyacinth,
and pink sandstone or mahogany unalome –
that symbol of growth and ascendance, of betterment
Is a better world possible
or have we fucked it?
I ask him, and he smiles,
and his eyes turn heavenwards
as he talks to me of the winding path,
back and forth but upwards,
eventually
And he talks to me of hands that mend,
hands curved like baskets,
like nets,
hands that hold and hands that catch,
hands that plant and hands that harvest,
fingers that are sealed in mudras,
and palms pressed together in thanks
