This poem first appeared on Your Daily Poem February 13, 2014, and subsequently on A Year of Being Here on March 25, 2015:
A Marriage in the Hands
You make a fist, that I might see
your skin grow tight again,
smoothed across your hand.
Those big hands that you like
to joke are too heavy when carried
all day at the ends of your arms.
Then you relax your hand,
and all the skin relaxes, letting
go the taut shine of youth,
and I see your sacrifice,
the thirty years you’ve held
us close, held my strength
for me, and all your tenderness.
I put my own hand out, relaxed,
palm down, next to yours.
You are aging, so am I, and this
is something we have sworn
always to do as one. Undeniably
I see we have. Then you make
a fist again. I make my own.
As one we smooth the way ahead.
