Sherry Chandler

Anna Hampstead Branch

from Songs for My Mother

Her Hands

MY mother’s hands are cool and fair,
They can do anything.
Delicate mercies hide them there
Like flowers in the spring.

When I was small and could not sleep,
She used to come to me,
And with my cheek upon her hand
How sure my rest would be.

For everything she ever touched
Of beautiful or fine,
Their memories living in her hands
Would warm that sleep of mine.

Her hands remember how they played
One time in meadow streams,—
And all the flickering song and shade
Of water took my dreams.

Swift through her haunted fingers pass
Memories of garden things;—
I dipped my face in flowers and grass
And sounds of hidden wings.

One time she touched the cloud that kissed
Brown pastures bleak and far;—
I leaned my cheek into a mist
And thought I was a star.

All this was very long ago
And I am grown; but yet
The hand that lured my slumber so
I never can forget.

For still when drowsiness comes on
It seems so soft and cool,
Shaped happily beneath my cheek,
Hollow and beautiful.

— Anna Hampstead Branch, from Rittenhouse, Jessie B., ed. The Little Book of Modern Verse. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917; New York: Bartleby.com, 2002).

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