The Hands That Lit Eternity

her hands did not turn on light bulbs. they were light bulbs, they were clay vessels through which flowed a light tired from too much godliness. when she entered the room, it wasn’t her who entered, it was a silence that had lost its voice in a burned temple, and had come searching for it inside me. the angel beneath the bed came out like a healed shadow and whispered to me: “Now you can sleep, your mother’s hands are keeping watch.” and I, a child uttering his first prayer, looked into my mother’s palms as if into a holy book, unknown, but true. once, an old woman from the village told me: “Women like your mother do not come into the world, they pour forth, like light from icons or like God from a child.” since then, when I think of light, I do not see the sun, but my mom’s hands wiping the dust from the face of the world.