Quiet Hand

I poured a hill of flaxen shells—
some in between the pavers at my feet—
but some into the plate of my quiet hand.
A gardener taught me:
It’s the quiet hand that receives
before the soil.

There are men in my life I have never met
whose hands have come before their faces.
Nicolas curled the Oud around his body
as if the wood bent in the middle, as if
the wood was the center of his palm washed white,
washed soft like my grandmother’s handmade dresses,
and the tones of his country folded in my mind
over and over and over again.

Hi planted a garden on a hill off a road in Ohio.
He knew a quiet hand holds the bodies
of tall stemmed echinacea, of thin-haired carrot tops
of squash leaves that open wide to the sun
and stick to your skin with their spiny teeth.
He knew marigolds sprouted gold halos to ward off pests
and his rows folded into the earth like the knot in a river bend
over and over and over again.

It’s my mother’s hands in the hospital
I seem to remember first. An arm laid still,
a bedsheet creased, a book face down and folded back
to keep the page while keeping the watch.
What I’ve stacked in the basement—
of her unfinished paintings and rough welled papers,
of her rotting paints and broken charcoal points—

it’s a quiet field of forgotten things
and the birds who clip their wings against
Bloodroot and Mayapple,
Butterfly Weed and Trillium,
drop their soft bodies across the grasses
without a sound.

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Yasmin Mariam Kloth writes creative nonfiction and poetry. Her writing, often rooted in her Middle Eastern heritage, has been published in the Penn Review, Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, Chestnut Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, LA Times, and other outlets. Yasmin’s debut collection, Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation, is an exploration of her family memories and the Middle East.