Your empty hands

the hands of others
took the place of yours

while you my blood
drank from the acrid river of my absence

while with painful breasts
you dawned captive

your hands empty of my tiny hands
endless hours without me

at that distance
ancestral now and still

the hands of others
held me through summer nights

the hands of others
made me believe in ephemeral certainties

like sleeping wrapped in a lliclla
on my indigenous mother’s back

like being a living doll
for two cousins

but you had no substitute
for my hands


only the emptiness

By Xaviera Ringeling