Gardener's Calloused Hands

Lyrics

I see your hands.
Not in a portrait.
Not in a book.

I see them in the pre-dawn chill of a March morning,
Seventeen-something, the year doesn't matter.
Cracked knuckles pushing aside the last of the winter straw.
The soil, cold and black, packed under your nails.
Your apron, linen stained with the good dirt,
smelling of damp earth and yesterday's parsley.
You press the tiny, hard promises of seeds into the furrows.

These calloused hands, this unwritten journal.
Each scar a chapter, each line a season's toil.
No one wrote your name,
but you wrote the earth.
You worked the Tended Ground.

I see them on a porch swing, August, eighteen-fifty.
The rhythmic snap of a thousand pea pods for the winter pantry.
The phantom ache from the well bucket's rope handle.
The iron trowel's handle, worn smooth as river stone,
shaped perfectly to your grip, an extension of your will.
You never stopped moving, from first light to the last.

These calloused hands, this unwritten journal.
Each scar a chapter, each line a season's toil.
No one wrote your name,
but you wrote the earth.
You worked the Tended Ground.

I see the ghost of your grip on my own shovel.
I see your shadow bent over the weeding in the Town Hall gardens,
a century later, in a faded photograph from '22.
The same determination.
The same strength that doesn't need to speak its name.
The legacy isn't in a stone, it's in the soil's memory.

Your hands.
Finally at rest.
The dirt never fully scrubs clean.