My parents were in and of themselves a strong race, the blood of elements equal and the same, and beautiful were their hands: my mother’s shaping pots from river clay, my father’s pulling down an orchard’s fruit—whose hands lift and carry the child to bed were dragon’s wings, and where I slept there slept the dragon’s egg, there nested love and hope and all the skies, that I might dream, and soar, and catch the chariots wheeling bright one morning through the cedars.

Unforgettable—the wordless harmonies and old ways back to fields: when winter ends the water remembers. And I remember the ways of hands, brown hands given a few acres of valley earth, brown hands in toil, equal and the same, their hard strength of mind and heart upon me, as shines the sun, as shapes and lifts the world out of clay, as loads a crate with autumn plums.

the moonlit stream...
sooner or later we all
gaze into the sky

Bio: Michael McClintock