{"id":12552,"date":"2018-03-27T10:42:01","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T09:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/those-hands\/"},"modified":"2018-03-27T10:42:01","modified_gmt":"2018-03-27T09:42:01","slug":"those-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/those-hands\/","title":{"rendered":"Those Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Mike Jenkins<\/strong> offers a prose-poem inspired by Martin Hayes\u2019 book of poetry \u2018The things our hands once stood for\u2019 <\/a><\/p>\n

Those Hands<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

for Martin Hayes<\/em>                                    <\/p>\n

   I\u2019ll never forget those hands resting on his lap like two sleeping cats till his body was wracked by a coughing fit and they woke and shook disturbed by dreams of slobbering, snarling jaws.<\/p>\n

   Those hands knew deep down what I had acquired in studies, courses of rivers and streams black on his palms; while I had merely drawn a map of the Valleys with a shaded area to mean coalfield, like a tainted lung.<\/p>\n

   Those hands \u2013 the pick \u2018n\u2019 shovel of them \u2013 had known the obdurate seams, blind tunnels and a dust so dense it seemed a swarm, a plague.<\/p>\n

   As he talked they opened up and shone, glowed with his up-down tones which followed the streets down to the nearby park and Nye Bevan museum and back uphill sucking at precious breath.<\/p>\n

   As he talked, they played like the kids he\u2019d never had; cats scampering along fence-tops and clawing up bark.<\/p>\n

   Such hands you\u2019ll never see again, engrained with stories of his butties, of desperate rescues, of pit-ponies born into dark galleries.<\/p>\n

   Those hands had been buried, were a print of carbon; had risen to rub the gentle flames of skin, to a hearth where he sat with his missis coaxing the fire to a high burning.    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mike Jenkins offers a prose-poem inspired by Martin Hayes\u2019 book of poetry \u2018The things our hands once stood for\u2019  Those Hands for Martin Hayes       …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":486,"featured_media":12550,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/486"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}