Reading good poetry is like the first spring sowing. The poems slip off the page like marigold seeds from a fresh packet to your palm. Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven, Naomi Thiers' first book of poems, is a well-crafted collection that quickly takes root in the mind.
In the first section, titled "The Other Side," we travel from "Abandoned Prison, Leon, Nicaragua," where the voices of the crucified still shout out, to "Neighborhood Meeting," where "[w]e moved for two hours down the hard row/houses set so close girls hear each/other bleed." Thiers hands back to us our own lives crafted into art. She has walked, as a North American, the dusty roads around Esteli, Nicaragua. She has taught English to Salvadoran refugees. She lives in the neighborhoods where "Boards sealed the mouth of the no-color house/that raised invisible children" ("No-Color"). The sounds, smells, laughter, and tension of this living are tangible in her writing.
The second section is titled "Red Envelope," referring to the Chinese tradition of giving red envelopes filled with money on New Year's as a sign of good luck. Here we meet people who do not seem so lucky.
In "Recruits In Flight," Thiers describes young men heading off to boot camp: "They laugh,/their scalps white as crushed corn....The jowled/old hands who plucked them know a head half-flayed/is theirs." In "Ongoing Prayer" we visit a friend going down with AIDS. The red envelopes here are the poems themselves, given as good luck to those for whom simple beauties, freedom, and a quiet place to rest are rare commodities.
THE LAST SECTION is called "Dumb Luck," for those who find themselves on the receiving end of grace for no good reason. Here are the exquisite love poems with such images as, "Your bed a warm river bottom" and "I have hungered for the flat gold of your foot" ("Two Facets").
Also, the voices of Thiers' grandmothers speak again in "To Weight It Down," in which they are sewing seed pearls on their granddaughter's wedding gown and one looks at her own hands remembering, "the claim of dirt/when she rooted marigolds around her lawn,/the ragged cold that made her knuckles ache/and sing, the way the story clings in flesh."
In Thiers' writing, flesh becomes word again and the kingdom is found in the most unlikely places. One of my favorites in this collection is "Fire on N Street, 1981," because life really is this funny. She describes the surreal scene of the night when the ministry houses of a Washington, D.C. church caught on fire:
Lights whap on in the menagerie of charity...
Prostitutes are shrieking...
So pass the panic in Spanish, in Laotian
the Urban Oasis is ablaze!...
Firemen scream JUMP! Women freeze on the third floor.
"You can DO it," sisters holler from the street:
support group at midnight...
Volunteers pile out of Joshua House.
Something to write home about....
Now the working girls are working the firetruck.
The Laotian children are hacking (their secret
is out, the live chicken hidden in the basement)....
By the time the pastor arrives from the suburbs,
it might be the Kingdom."
Naomi Thiers has a sharp eye for glimpsing the Spirit and a power for writing down what she has seen. The miracle is that she is looking at you and me.
Rose Marie Berger is an associate editor of Sojourners.
Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven. By Naomi Thiers. Washington Writers' Publishing House, 1992. $10 (paper).
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!