Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—only the thumb is larger, longer—in these handsI could trust the world, or in many hands like these,handling power-tools or steering-wheelor touching a human face… Such hands could turnthe unborn child rightways in the birth canalor pilot the exploratory rescue-shipthrough icebergs, or piece togetherthe fine, needle-like sherds of a great krater-cupbearing on its sidesfigures of ecstatic women stridingto the sibyl’s den or the Eleusinian cave—such hands might carry out an unavoidable violencewith such restraint, with such a graspof the range and limits of violencethat violence ever after would be obsolete. This is poem VI, from Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems collection, written between 1974-1976. These were originally published as a complete collection but were later re-published and included as part of another collection of works, written between 1974-1977, called The Dream Of A Common Language.
Twenty-One Love Poems and The Floating Poem, (un-numbered) can all be found here at oldpoetry.
