All that is past possesses our present

1/26/09 - reading for another class tonight - Adrienne Rich's poetry - Number VI of her Twenty -One Love Poems:
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own-
only the thumb is larger, longer-in these hands
I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,
handling power -tools or steering-wheel
or touching a human face....Such hands could turn
the unborn child rightways in the birth canal
or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship
through icebergs, or piece together
the fine, needle-like shreds of a great krater-cup,
bearing on its sides
figures of ecstatic women striding
to the sibyl's den or the Eleusinian cave-
such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence
with such restraint, with such a grasp
of the range and limits of violence
that violence ever after would be obsolete.

Seemed like a fitting entry for the Hymn to Demeter...