Hands - Ted Hughes

Your hands were strange – huge.
A farmer’s joke: ‘still got your bloody great hands!’
You used them with as little regard
As old iron tools – as if their creased, glossed,
   Crocodile leather
Were nerveless, like an African’s footsoles.

When the barbed wire, tightening hum-rigid,
Snapped and leaped through your grip
You flailed your fingers like a caned boy, and laughed:
‘Barbarous wire!’ then just ignored them
As the half-inch deep, cross-hand rips dried.

And when your grasp nosed bullocks, prising their 
   mouths wide,
So they dropped to their knees
I understood again
How the world of half-ton hooves, and horns,
And hides heedless as oaken-boarding, comes to be           
  manageable.

Hands more of a piece with your tractor
Than with their own nerves,
Having no more compunction than dung-forks,
But suave as warm oil inside the wombs of ewes,
And monkey delicate

At that cigarette
Which glowed patiently through all your labours
Nursing the one in your lung
To such strength, it squeezed your strength to water
And stopped you.

Your hands lie folded, estranged from all they have
   done
and as they have never been, and startling – 
So slender, so taper, so white,
Your mother’s hands suddenly in your hands – 
In that final strangeness of elegance.