Her Fingers: Weaving YAHWEH’s Dust

Her fingers weave clay and hymns to YAHWEH, crafting life’s pulse in a vivid prose poem.

Her fingers, rough from years of coaxing stories out of clay, hovered over the wheel. They didn't just shape; they whispered secrets into the damp Earth. She'd spin it into vessels that held more than water, grief, maybe, or a flicker of hope. In the dim studio, lit by a single bulb swaying like a drunk firefly, she worked. Her digits danced, quick and sure, then slow, as if apologizing to the clay for rushing. She'd learned this from her grandmother, whose own hands, as gnarled as olive branches, traced kolam patterns in rice flour at dawn, inviting good fortune to a Tamil doorstep. Those fingers told tales without words, and now hers tried too.

She paused, her nails caked with Earth, and she thought of other hands. Perhaps the guitarist down the street, his fingertips highly calloused from teasing the blues from the strings until the air around him hummed with longing. Or perhaps, the weaver she'd seen in a market once, her fingers were threading wool like they were stitching the wind itself. Hers, though, her fingers itched to create something new, something raw, something that'd outlast her. She pressed harder. The clay yielded a curve, a lip, a bowl that might cradle someone's soup years from now. Her hands; she knew they weren't just tools. Her fingers had become storytellers, slender rebels against the crushing silence.

Sometimes, her fingers faltered. They'd tremble, not from doubt but from the weight of the thoughts they couldn't say, couldn't coax from the clay. Joy lived in their motion, sure, but so did that quiet ache. An ache like the memory of a song she'd forgotten the words for. She'd paint next, maybe let her digits smear saffron and indigo across a canvas. She'd trace dreams that were too slippery for speech. Or, she'd gesture to the kids outside, flicking her thumb to mimic her grandfather's old "come here" signal. Then she'd be half-laughing at how it never worked on them.

Her fingers, they weren't perfect. They fumbled, smudged, and missed notes. But they moved anyway, stitching her days into something worth keeping. In their creases, she carried the dust of YAHWEH's creation, weaving her own small hymns to the maker's endless craft and the pulse of a life within her that refused to sit still.

I have a second-generation American friend whose family is from India. I was at their house, watching an old Indian movie about a girl who was a pottery maker. His grandmother was there, and she told us all about making pottery back in India, plus many interesting things about their home and where they lived. I dreamed about the girl in the movie, probably because I thought she was gorgeous. I did a little research, and that's how I came up with this strange piece.