Little Indian Girl

If we're trying to understand the universe why can't we do it through our hands, fragile little bones bending to send the energy we conduct by blood pulsing in and out of chambers through all that we touch, with the hopes of feeling out the edges of matter and gravity, two of the only things we can be sure of, after all, the bits and pieces we have to put together are that which the earth provides us, and I swear it provides us with miracles, sparkling radiant mirrors beneath the dirt that show us we can't possibly grasp our own reflections because the "i" that we see is less of an image and more of a conception, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about a little girl closing her eyes and dancing, her twirls falling in and out of rhythm, the hem of her dress making ripples in a tide that her arms snap back and forth to break, her spastic kicks pounding out the wrong beats on a sandy shore, to embed her footprints as deep as possible in the grains - her hands push the heavy air to keep the water moving, and the wind she creates stirs up dirt from my stomach that I can barely keep choked in my throat, and I watch her tiny fingers play the music she's hearing in her head. I want to know what what she saw every time she spun around and the world turned blurry, colors mixing together to form an alternate landscape - Tell me little girl, what world did your fingers find? She said that she was on a mission to find a place deep down where she can sing everything she says in any language she wants and the only things that grow big are the flowers, and they make the whole place smell real nice, a place where she's not too small to traipse through the forest without an adult, and not too big to use dandelions as transportation, a place where everyone, all the kids like her, can pick the fruits of the flowers and never go hungry, cause she's seen so many kids be hungry, and what she doesn't understand about the universe is why? And I know I can learn a lot from her because even at the tender age of four, she knows that open-palmed children deserve more than they can muster up the courage to comprehend, that their little hands can't possibly hold the weight of a vegetable or fruit, while the fruition of coined giving dissolves into cracked palms of old men - and when they touch you, they don't feel you, rather you can feel their energy draining into the sewage beneath them, curiosity undermined by destitution, dust and grime blocking the passageways that would allow them to hear the same music or to know that it's gravity weighing them down more than the makeshift chains that bind them to a curbside, their sparkling radiant mirrors are buried so deep in their chest that the miracle becomes finding the "I" and pulling it to any surface, so this little girl, she sings for them, little prayers filled with seeds, soil and water, hoping that one day their fingers will touch the bark of trees and feel the liberation of timelessness work its way into their veins, that they can climb up into the leaves and make a blanket from the night sky, rather than smog, and I tell her that if she loves them, she'll dedicate every star she sees to them, to give them some light to hold on to because the stars may change depending on where you are when you're looking at them, but the patterns will follow you, and constantly remind you that you're looking into something of rhyme and reason and the most chaos imaginable, and that, sweet girl, is the reason so many children go hungry, because among all the rhyme and reason of the universe there always has to be more chaos than imaginable, but if you can use your hands to create a home and your fingers can rub off caked stains of dirt and every touch can send warmth in the form of a love unmatched by spoken word then why haven't we been using our hands to understand the universe