In an old boarding school picture
I saw those native boys
With purple hands
The anguish in their eyes
full of pain
From the nuns who bound
their hands with ties
simply for being left-handed
And I felt my own left hand cramping up
-from the shame
--from the pain of being told
I couldn’t write with it.
Those white teachers in grade school
told me it was wrong
and so they forced me
to write using my right hand.
And was it right?
To be taught this way?
An education pockmarked
with superstition
And in their beliefs
--I felt I was marked
by the beast of my kind
By their notions of me being wild
backwoods, unrefined
I used to dig my nails into my left palm
So much that it hurt--that it bled
A stigmata self-made
A byproduct of shame
of being told I am one of Cain’s children
And I am marked
by the color of my skin
Doomed to be a stolen orphan
Buried in an unmarked grave
Just like those poor children
with purple hands
Crying through the photograph
I feel it still echoing
in my mind, my memories
--of past trauma handed down to me
generation to generation
I am those children
Stuck in a system of nuns, of priests, of schools
That have tied me into their notion
That I can be taught to be just like them
That I can live a life without sin
And I cry and I want to unbind
Left hand, right hand
Wrong way, right way
And with this all of this
hatred and frustration
I forgot I had my own heartlines, lifelines, bloodlines
