! ! Thumbnails And Finger Ends

A book of learned scholarship, open in my hands, at the first page… and then I saw, to the right of it, my thumb nail…and marvelled – at its perfection, at its beauty, and at my own ignorance – which strangely, was all part of that same beauteous perfection… the thumbnail: curved, as a hollowed claw, the curve I knew would give it added strength; sitting as secure as any child of love, within the folded mystery of skin and flesh; three-coloured: pale rising moon emerging from its secret nail-bed as some goddess might appear; then the subtle shades of rosy pink, hinting at blood serving readily the nail’s demands; finally, the top (long, shaped, as best to gouge potato’s eyes, and other kitchen tasks…) : I looked at it, and marvelled: the whole creation, conspiring to present this perfect thing… Fifty years and more ago, I wrote, in those years when I despaired of making sense of so-called ‘adult’ world, sitting at the desk, to find myself before setting off to earn my daily bread, I wrote – in lines that never quite linked up their visioned moments into complete poems, on white and yearning pages like a life unwrit: ‘we know not our own finger ends…’ The wrinkled thumb and finger – they have lasted; the holy mystery - praise God - remains.