The Touch

A Poem

The first thing we feel after our inaugural breath, out there in the open,
is the touch of those who have made us. It is our first experience of nurture,
one which we keep in reserve and crave during whatever distance is our duration.
Our initiation to inquisitive compulsions should serve us well. 

Every time we touch we leave a smear of memory behind,
as film, fingerprint, dusting or fleck and in the patination grows a story,
which is told to those who will make the connection, listening through contact,
and who take their time in contemplation to gain this perception.

Listen, these objects, the guardians, will not reach out to us, they cannot.
You will never understand unless you make that effort, the first move.
But the touch of another human is a gift to give or receive
and inherent in that is every story they bring, read or have borrowed.

Tell me that the touch of another’s flesh does not move you. Somehow.
Remember, ecstasy and revulsion are just points on the scale of feeling.

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Madrid, November 2013. Nikon fm2

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