A Show of Hands

words by Dave Thompson

I feel something

when You grip the brushes and

begin to paint

swirling hisses

across the wooden room and

I feel something stirring as

Your hands

knuckled and bruised

weathered and chipped,

like slender sticks plucked

from a leather satchel,

send sizzles up spines

alight on cymbals and bells

and catch me holding in breath.

You give life to lungs and loft to air—

An audience of

morning-haze deference

below regal windows

feels something moving within

these southeast arrows of sunlight as

fingertips

conduct eddies and pools

of dust to dust that

come to rest in

elongated tones and

silky sheets of sound and

surround my surrender.

I feel something—

Something that softens my

wooden defences

and presses into the sharp keys of

my ebony heart

flattening my ivory tower constructs like

eighty-eight theses,

storming and reforming my soul

with the knowledge that

I am free to feel something

in these felt hammers and strings

these harmonics and skins

these callouses and strains

these sinews and planes of

plank and steel and

heart and mind and

assembled here before You—

We feel something

A Brief Visit to Our Island Province