PAD Day 18: You Gotta Hand It to Me

First, I want to give a shout-out to Rick Lupert and his excellent website Poetry Super Highway , which I had been aware of but didn't get involved with until the past year or so. Rick has lots going on there, including his current poem-a-day prompt feature. Each week he features two poets and a poem or two from each of them. (You can find my feature in the "Past Poets Archive" for the week of August 14-20, 2023.) He also sponsors contests and the occasional anthology, and he has organized opportunities for poets to "swap" their published books with each other (nationally or internationally) and share any e-books they may have for free. Poetry Super Highway also has a public Facebook page, where poets share news of readings, publications, etc. Some of us poets who are participating in the daily challenge are also posting our new poems there.

Today's prompts:

WBP: Write a "pessimistic" poem.

NPWM: "...write a poem in which the speaker expresses the desire to be someone or something else, and explains why."

PSH: "Look at your hand. Really look at it. Notice the graph of its fingers, knuckles. Look at both sides. Study the lines a fortune teller would study. Now think about where this hand has been… whom it has touched… when… where. Think back to the kinds of chores and work this hand has done. Hammering? Cooking?Writing? She pauses. Has this hand been in pain? In ecstasy? In embarrassment? You certainly by now have images of your hand you will continue to see as you close your eyes. Close your eyes. Peruse those images. Pick one or more you’d like to write about… or, when you open your eyes, just describe your hand." (James Penha, describing a prompt from Sharon Olds)

Here is my response to the first prompt, a "shadorma", a short form supposedly of Spanish origin with 6 lines and a syllable count of 3/5/3/3/7/5. It's been suggested that the shadorma is an invented form that has been passed off as a historical one, a "hoax" if you will, something like Billy Collins' "paradelle." But it has gained legitimate popularity, and I've already written a few in my career, so here's another one:

Shadorma: Democracy
 
I worry:
our pendulum swings
both ways but
if it goes
too hard and far to the right

will it break our clock?

And here is my poem for the other two prompts:

My Hands
 
My hands have been a pair of dilettantes.
They’ve lived a rather privileged life,
flitting from one activity to another,
done some light carpentry and yard work,
a craft or two, and a lot of writing and typing.
Today there’s not a callus on them;
they are warm and pink and smooth,
years younger than they deserve to look.
 
The only trauma they’ve endured
was on the right wrist, a compound fracture
from a fall off my back steps.
Surgery, bars, plates and pins, and months
of rehab made me almost whole again.
 
A quarter century later, I still have the battle scars—
a vertical line across the inside of the wrist,
two puncture marks on the back of the hand
like a snakebite, another mark on the forearm.
Less range of motion too—pronation, they call it.
I can’t quite turn my wrist completely palm-up,
so lifting things from underneath is hard,
or simply taking change from a cashier.
Other than that, the hand looks as normal
as its southpaw partner.
 
I wonder what my hands would look like
if I were another person, like my father-in-law,
who worked for years in his metal shop,
his hands stained many days with grease and grit
but scrubbed clean before dinner each night.
The only thing he couldn’t change was
half a missing forefinger on the left hand,
from the bite of a shearing machine.
 
Or perhaps my young friend the flautist,
whose hands create such beautiful music.
But she complains of pain and stiffness
in the joints that go all the way up
her arms and shoulders, and therapy
is as much a part of her routine as practice.

Even great music has its price.
 
So yes, I guess I’ll keep these hands—
there’s still a lot they want to do.
 

 I consider this one a draft, really. It's rather prosy and could be a bit shorter. Also, it has a bit of a "pat" ending. But it was an interesting exercise, and I'll probably return later to polish it up.