Starie ruki ne krasivie. Old hands are not beautiful, she said.

But they are.
As they cut up beets,
and sort Scrabble letters
which don't turn easily
into English words.

Hands that tested blood in the lab, hour after hour.
Or brushed dogs' fur until it gleamed.

Hands, braiding the hair of an 18 year-old girl.

Then grasping a pen that wrote of Stalin's evil
and sent her to a prison camp for 25 years,
where frozen roads were built and
letters from home were opened rarely
and with great pain.

Hands that must have clapped when Stalin died
making possible the quiet exit from Lubyanka,
into the Moscow sunshine
and the new
world.

To Rome, Toronto, Edmonton and here.

Where the very same hands turn beets into Borsch
and hold Scrabble tiles that might never have been held at all.

Lovely, loving camera-shy hands that,
despite their refusal to appear below,
are so very thankful to have aged.


Larissa Klein