The Finger [poem]

Raising the finger to God. An interesting attempt at a reversal. However, God uses the index. Do you remember Michelangelo’s panel on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, God’s finger to Adam’s? But then maybe Michelangelo showed us the index the way artists for millennia showed us the wounds in the palms. We know in fact that the Romans nailed between the bones of the wrist. Palms could not support the weight of the body with its arms stretched across the traverse beam of the cross. Nailing the body between the bones of the wrists allowed the body to be stretched across and supported in its agonizing slow suffocation that was Crucifixion. Christ was nailed in the wrists. The wounds would have been in the wrists. We saw for millennia the palms. Victims of the stigmata would show the wounds in the palms; Christ sending messages in the iconography people understood. Jesus speaks Chinese to Chinese nuns in China. God speaks Arabic to Coptic saints. Have I nailed this?