A Most Pleasant Surprise

“Poetry surprises us with what we already know.” – John Fuller

Born in January, 1937 in Great Britain, Fuller is the son of poet and professor Roy Fuller and went on to a similar career of his own, authoring 15 collections of poetry, several other books, and teaching at colleges and universities in the United States and Britain.  Among his best known collections are Stones and Fires, Song and Dance, and The Dice Cup.     A multiple major award winner for his own works, he also established The Sycamore Press to publish many of the most influential poets of the last 50 years. For Saturday's Poem, here is Fuller's,

       An Exchange between the Fingers and the Toes

Fingers:

Cramped, you are hardly anything but fidgets.

We, active, differentiate the digits:

Whilst you are merely little toe and big

(Or, in the nursery, some futile pig)

Through vital use as pincers there has come

Distinction of the finger and the thumb;

Lacking a knuckle you have sadly missed

Our meaningful translation to a fist;

And only by the curling of that joint

Could the firm index come to have a point.

You cannot punch or demonstrate or hold

And therefore cannot write or pluck or mould:

Indeed, it seems deficiency in art

Alone would prove you the inferior part.

Toes:

Not so, my friends. Our clumsy innocence

And your deft sin is the main difference

Between the body’s near extremities.

Please do not think that we intend to please:

Shut in the dark, we once were free like you.

Though you enslaved us, are you not slaves, too?

Our early balance caused your later guilt,

Erect, of finding out how we were built.

Your murders and discoveries compile

A history of the crime of being agile,

And we it is who save you when you fight

Against the odds: you cannot take to flight.

Despite your fabrications and your cunning,

The deepest instinct is expressed in running.

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