Potential (honeycomb version)

Potential (honeycomb version) (2025). Inkjet print on handmade paper, board, bookcloth. 12 x 6.5 x 0.75” closed, 12 x 13.25 x 2” open. One of a kind. Cynthia Sears Artists’ Books Collection.

This dimensional poem indulges both grief and hope for human ability to return to hand skills for survival, art, and community.

Potential

What is slipping through our fingers
is our fingers themselves
No longer able to bend metal to their will
Or sew or spin or weave
Or fell trees and hollow them out to set sail
Or catch and gut a fish, not even debone it
There is so little for them to do
save tap-tap-swipe-swipe, skating
ceaselessly over smooth surfaces
that promise more than the world
while steering us away from it.
We used to sing while these digits flew
over instruments,
sowed & harvested & cooked
transformed the earth’s gifts into
more gifts:
baskets yurts greenhouses gardens
Now our ears are plugged,
the commune no longer physical
fingers like dry twigs on a dead tree
our hands go limp as we take away
things for them to do,
our eyes glaze over.
Is there is no return?
Quietly, someone picks up a needle, a
flower, fluff from a weed, and repeats a
transformation that our fingers know
instinctively
Light returns to our eyes,
our heads tingle,
and our hands’ work lights up like
fireflies at dusk.