My Hand is a River

Sarah Osborne

Blood flows as tributaries
to a river’s beating heart.

Smooth surface-waves barely perceptible
to the naked eye and yet

they can sweep past ridges and mountain peaks,
meandering between muscle and tendons,

movements so precise and gentle,
I have to trace my finger over their path

just to feel their presence.
I follow their course with all its twists and turns –

hydraulic action scattering ions,
attrition shaping red blood cells into smooth

biconcave pebbles, until beyond the stack
they disappear in a wavelength of light,

somewhere beneath the sediment of skin.
When I look back at my hand, I am reminded

that I too, am the sea
and that I too can swim in gentle waters,

waters just as blue as the rivers that run within
and so I do, without question, 

I do.

The Science

The inspiration for this poem came whilst I was watching my daughters swim. The heat within the building had made the blue veins on my hand dilate and stand out, reminding me of a meandering river. This poem therefore reflects on two elements of science. First, it describes the movement of deoxygenated blood through veins back to the heart and compares it to tributaries as they flow towards the mainstem (parent river). In doing so, it introduces other geological processes that occur within river systems and re-imagines them happening within our bodies, for example the hydraulic action of the circulatory system and movement of dissolved inorganic ions such as Na+ , Ca2+ and Mg2+ .

Second, it explores the colour of our veins. As a child, I was convinced that oxygenated blood (carried by arteries) was red and deoxygenated blood (carried by veins) was blue. Today, this is still a common misconception. Of course, it all has to do with wavelengths of light, with red light having a longer wavelength and thus penetrating human tissue much deeper than green or blue light. As our veins are just beneath the skin, our eyes perceive our veins to be blue. In a river, water is better at absorbing those longer red wavelengths, and again this means what we see is blue.

The Poet

Sarah Osborne is a teaching assistant and mother of four from Harrogate, North Yorkshire. Although no longer working in a scientific field, Sarah still has a strong passion for the subject and has recently discovered a love of poetry. Sarah has been lucky enough to have been published in a number of journals and anthologies over the last two years including the York Literary Review (2022), To Live Here Anthology (Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, 2023) and Mother Nature Burns (Sunday Mornings At The River, 2023).

Next poem: Perception by S.E. Forbes-Fairfax