These hands remember your hands—
the way they felt in mine, the way the nails through your wrists
sent waves of pain shooting through me 
for so many lifetimes, the way
our hands danced in the pre-dawn moments
before the soldiers came. 

These hands remember the feeling
of wiping the sweat from your brow and the tears from your cheeks.
These hands remember anointing your head with oil
and spilling out treasured perfume upon your feet. 
These hands rememer all I cannot yet write:
so much of our story stolen, shaped
into something it was never meant to be. 

In time, these hands will dance again, their fingers
formed into a gentle grip around the pen to write
a few more stories fo our time along the shore, 
my floundering on the forgotten seas of time.
And finally these hands will move to write 
all that unfolds now. In the end these hands
will come to rest upon my heart where your hands,
in the Claddagh clasp hold me together even still.