Feeling

In these hands, they say, you can do anything - hold the roughness of labour and stone, work the dirt into earth to bear life, hold the edge of a knife till blood runs down your arm...
...but in these hands you can't feel the bruises which gnaw at heartstrings and numb the mind. These hands can't reach them or feel them swelling and pulsating. And in the whole time we spend trying to look for a bandage which can't even wrap around or stem a flow of black blood onto the floor, we forget that there are other hands to help us through because the darkness is so thick we can only feel that and nothing else.