Sestina for What My Hands Learned
Dawit BekeleEleven years now on the same night shift,building something I will never call home,my knuckles slower now than my own hands,sending back west the better part of moneyI earn before the dawn's first factory light,so she can say my name on the Sunday call.
She used to joke that I fell in love with the call,more than the woman waiting through the shift,but she doesn't know what keeps a man in artificial lightonce he's forgotten how dark gets at home.I don't tell her it's never only about money,it's about what a man can still offer with his hands.
At forty I finally understand my father's hands,how little they said, how much they said in one call,a man who thought love was mostly just money,clocking in before the kids woke for another shift,building, with his absence, the only homeany of us ever knew, lit in his particular light.
Some nights the warehouse runs on nothing but light,fluorescent and indifferent to tired hands,and I think of the kitchen, small and warm, at home,and do the math on when I can afford the callthat isn't rushed, that isn't timed around a shift,that doesn't start with how are you, with money.
I used to think the whole job was about money,a thing you traded hours for, like selling lightby the hour, clocking out at the end of shift,but it isn't money that builds a house — handsdo that, and the patience to make the callthat says, whatever this costs me, you are home.
Next year, maybe, I let myself say homemeans the place I'm standing, not just the moneywired ahead of me like an apology, a callplaced too late, arriving in somebody else's light.For now I keep both truths folded in these hands:I built it loving them. I missed it, working the shift.
Call it love, if you want. I call it the shiftthat never clocks out — these hands, this light, this home,paid for, line by line, in money, and never just money.