Poetry As Prayer

Poetry Recommendation: “These Hands, If Not Gods” by Natalie Diaz

Retrieved from Academy of American Poets.

Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?

And wasn’t that good?
Them at your hips—

isn’t this what God felt when he pressed together
the first Beloved: Everything.
Fever. Vapor. Atman. Pulsus. Finally,
a sin worth hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a
You are mine.

It is hard not to have faith in this:
from the blue-brown clay of night
these two potters crushed and smoothed you
into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—

atlas of bone, fields of muscle,
one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,
both Morning and Evening.

O, the beautiful making they do—
of trigger and carve, suffering and stars—

Aren’t they, too, the dark carpenters
of your small church? Have they not burned
on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?

Haven’t they riveted your wrists, haven’t they
had you at your knees?

And when these hands touched your throat,
showed you how to take the apple and the rib,
how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,
didn’t you sing out their ninety-nine names—

Zahir, Aleph, Hands-time-seven,
Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,
Rubidium, August, and September—
And when you cried out, O, Prometheans,
didn’t they bring fire?

These hands, if not gods, then why
when you have come to me, and I have returned you
to that from which you came—bright mud, mineral-salt—
why then do you whisper O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
My hundred-handed one?

This gorgeous, complex poem demanded all of my attention and several re-reads to really make sense of it, and the work was well-worth the reward. Natalie Diaz is a captivating, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and if you haven’t read her work, I hope this poem encourages you to do so.

“These Hands, If Not Gods” borrows from a lot of different vocabularies and spiritualities to praise our hands and what they’ve done for humanity. There are a few craft elements worth analyzing in this piece, including:

• The reinterpretation of creation myths.
• The poem’s use of apostrophe (a literary direct address).
• Attention as an act of prayer.

Diaz pulls from several different spiritualities in this poem. Understandings of human creation are pulled from Christianity, Islam, and Greek mythology, with a reference to the soul also pulled from Hinduism. There’s a sense of the universal here, that Diaz is drawing a thread between religions across human history. At the same time, the poem seems to be working towards its own creation myth: that of hands and their service to humanity.

On the surface, this is simply a complicated, beautiful ode to hands. But simply calling this poem an ode feels like a disservice to it, because it’s not simply praise that’s happening in these stanzas—it’s a full-throated hymn to the divinity common among each of us, present in every story about who we are and where we are going.

Like most hymns, this poem relies heavily on the use of apostrophe—not the little line in possessive words, but the literary device in which you address a non-present person (or personified object). In this instance, the poem speaks to humanity, reminding us that the human hand is imbued with a sacred, conscious quality, as though its union with the human body was an intentional act, and as though hands themselves have godly qualities (as implied in the poem’s title).

As a result, some of the poem’s pronoun usage gets a little confusing. Consider alone the opening stanza:

Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?

“They,” here, seems to refer to hands—but then who is the “your” referring to? The “seven days” is clearly a reference to the Abrahamic creation stories (that God created the world in seven days), but then whose body is being referenced?

Looking at the “yous” and “yours” of following stanzas, it seems like the poem is using a universal “you”—in other words, it is addressing humanity as a whole. There’s a sense of these hands literally building up humanity, such as in these lines:

• these two potters crushed and smoothed you / into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—
• Aren’t they, too, the dark carpenters / of your small church? (An interesting reference to Jesus Christ, suggesting that hands are the prophets of humanity.)
• And when you cried out, O, Prometheans, / didn’t they bring fire?

That last bullet is a reference to the myth of Prometheus, the Greek Titan who may have created humanity and definitely gave us fire in ancient myth. Following that line is a stanza with some more ambiguous pronoun usage:

These hands, if not gods, then why
when you have come to me, and I have returned you
to that from which you came—bright mud, mineral-salt—
why then do you whisper O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
My hundred-handed one?

When I first read this stanza, I wondered if there was a shift in the poem’s address, and that the “you” here was talking to the hands and not to humanity. On a re-read, I think it’s still an address to humanity: that third line is suggestive of burying the dead, a reunion with the divine, and an invocation of humanity as the hundred-handed one. (Note: in Greek myth, the hundred-handed ones were monsters that helped the Gods overthrow the Titans.)

Lastly, who is the “I” of the poem? We should never assume the speaker of the poem is the author themselves. It is interesting that that “I” doesn’t appear until the last stanza, and only appears once; ditto the word “me.” Could the speaker of the poem be God?

This poem resists easy interpretation. Don’t read it looking for answers—you will only come across more glorious, difficult, and gloriously difficult questions.

Something I pulled from the poem was this: love is an act of attention; worship is an act of making. In your day to day life, what do you pay close attention to? What are you in the process of making? Poetry is often like this, a form of prayer—an invocation to something divine or larger than us.

Craft Perspective: “Simone Weil on Attention and Grace” by Maria Popova

Read it here, at The Marginalian.

This essay by Maria Popova makes a similar argument to the one I made above, and does so in fewer words. So much for originality.

That said, I like what Popova (and Simone Weil) has to say about attention. We are what we pay attention to.

What I was struck by, more than anything else, is that Weil wrote her thoughts on attention well before modern technology—there’s a sense in her words that, pre-internet, paying attention still wasn’t that easy. Perhaps distractibility is human nature. I don’t know a single person whose attention doesn’t feel spread across 50 different tasks; to use a modern analogy, I sometimes feel like I have 100 tabs open in my brain.

Writing, for me, often flexes my attention in a way the world doesn’t. Sure, I can get engrossed in a book or a conversation, but being engrossed in my own writing is different. That act of creation requires so many different parts of my brain and body to happen, and it doesn’t happen easily. And yet I notice that, after even 30 minutes of writing, I don’t feel drained, but momentarily transformed. That act of love and worship, of attention and creation, tends to charge me up, like how driving a car charges the battery rather than depletes it.

Of course, I still get distracted when I’m writing, whether that’s poetry or prose. I should be one of those people who turns their phone off when they’re writing, or throws their phone in a river altogether.

We all struggle to invest ourselves in our work. I have the luxury of being a single 20-something and living alone in a relatively quiet apartment. My few sources of distraction are the internet and my (admittedly very distracting) cat. I can’t imagine how much harder it is for someone with more obligations: children or elderly dependents, a more demanding job, roommates, chronic or mental illness, or even just the persistent, persevering yaps of a pampered teacup poodle.

What I’m saying is, Modernity is not kind to our attention spans. Weil’s generation struggled with attention; I can’t imagine what Weil would say about the attention economy we live in.

But Weil’s message still applies: attention is a conscious decision, an intentional pouring of ourselves into that which we choose to focus on.

Attention is also a skill that we can work on over time and regain, so long as we are gentle with ourselves. You might not be able to read a book for 60 minutes straight, but start with 5 minutes, then 10. You might not be able to write with complete focus for 30 minutes, but you can write a stanza, and if not that, a line. It takes persistence and time.

I also think the skills of meditation are useful here. Slow, conscious decision making is a skill we have to train ourselves to expand. And when our attention slips, we should return it to our task gently, without self-admonition.

What matters is the doing more than anything else. I’ve found that, the more intentional and consistent I am with my writing practice, the easier it is to pour myself into the work I want to be doing. The work might not feel as good as those quick dopamine hits from Instagram or iMessage, but the afterglow from having invested my whole self into my writing is well worth the work.

At the end of Popova’s essay, she quotes Weil saying that “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” You’ll find that, when you can train your attention on something for a long period of time, you will one day write poems/prayers as complex, loving, and attentive as Natalie Diaz’s, or essays as thought-out and true as Simone Weil’s.