Poem Response 3

Salvador Dali "Woman's Hands"

 "A Hand"

By: Jane Hirshfield

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body. 

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink. 

The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question. 

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

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Hirshfield begins her poem by saying a hand is not what we all know a

hand to be, "four fingers and a thumb". However, through the poem,  

instead of answering the question, what is a hand if not "four fingers 

and a thumb", Hirshfield tells the audience all the things a hand is not. 

This cryptic way of conveying a question, with no real answer, in part

intrigues and frustrates me. Hirshfield says the question is "transparent", 

but then contradicts this by ending her poem with the statement that it is 

"unanswerable". After reading the poem several times I came no closer 

to answering the question, but I did come to a deeper contemplation 

of the poem's images and mood.

The mood is very pensive. The poem reads almost like the speaker's 

inner dialogue. As if the speaker had these thoughts as they went 

about their day taking repeated notice of the hand's function in their life. 

They speak of things the hand does, such as writing, loving, and making 

bread. Or they liken a hand to something else in nature;

such as meadows and a maple leaf. 

Noticing the poet's focus, not on the hand, but on the common things

that it touches or is intrinsically similar to, brought something to my mind.

I realized that I may have missed the point. Perhaps Hirshfield's poem was not 

so literally about the hand, but about the people that hands belong to.  

The lines, "What empties itself falls into the place that is open. A hand turned 

upward holds only a single, transparent question" now implies something 

other than a mystery to me. An open hand stands for a person's general 

acceptance of others and the question is whether or not the hand will stay open.