HAND PRINT AT FONT DE GAUME
A hand outlined
on a wall,
the first halo
in recorded history
not surrounding
a pale transfigured
upturned face,
but an opened palm,
the edges blurring
into the ancient
painted
colouration
of hoofs and
animals
running amidst
the living stone,
the way our own hands
held against the light
trying to see,
tell us something
of the one looking out
through outstretched fingers.
Someone slightly surprised
by the outline
of their own extended
miracle nature,
by the way they can be
an astonishing something,
silhouetted against
what easily could have been
a neutral nothing.
The way you can come
to a tiny glimmer
of understanding
in that flickering,
underground light,
and in that primary
way of seeing: the first dawn
of some extraordinary
understanding,
of other worlds
beyond your own hand,
looking back at you,
reaching out to touch
you and find you
and even confirm you
in your self-finding
and your self-understanding,
in your stepping back
to look, as they must have done,
so long ago, seeing
in the dim lamp light
something that until this moment
had been completely hidden,
the blurred distinction between
where the world
seems to end
and where you begin
to live, and through that
the only life worth living
or painting against
any background,
the one where
you took the risk
of living fully
to those edges.
The hand outlined
on the wall
our first shy conversation
with creation,
the russet bison crowding below
as if to look, and all of our world
gathered round us,
as we gather now,
crouched in the cave
and half dark
of our present lives,
looking at that paint blown
around a youthful
outstretched hand,
so many tens
of thousands of years ago.
The first outline
that made you clear,
that brought you
and then us, to birth,
out of the surrounding,
seemingly immobile
now living, breathing
rock.
- David Whyte