Post Cursive

My hand flows with ease across the page,
connected rhythmic hills and valleys,
a mountain chain on a page linking hand and mind
from this present day
at my kitchen table
in the middle of my life
to a childhood classroom,
chalk dust in my nostrils
and thick, lined tablets and a stubby pencil
in a blonde pony-tailed little girl’s splayed fingers,
new tools awkwardly grasped while
furtively licking the acrid, freshly sharpened tip,
then scrawling for the first time the shapes
that would later come to define me.

Long years would pass,
years splintered, flayed, and broken
by circumstance and randomly cruel tragedy
beyond the child, girl, woman’s control,
but
smoothed, straightened, and sutured
by lines on a page,
flowing from mind to hand.

I watch the fuzzy, near transparently blonde
head of my grandson
bent over his work
at my kitchen table,
small splayed fingers grasping
his black digital tablet,
images, ideas, and thoughts of others
inserted between his mind and hand,
and I mourn a loss
he does not yet feel.