Thursday, March 24, 2022

Purple hands


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

I cut off my own circulation