A preserved king lies at the center of Hans Ostrom’s “Hands of the Wind,” parched like a leaf inside a pyramid. The first stanza delivers the tomb’s official reason for being: it protects a body, making a former king “impervious to grief, / Bacilli, and a shift of season.” But the words work against the apparent boast. To be impervious to grief is also to be unable to feel it; to be beyond bacteria and seasons is to be removed from the cycles that make a body alive. The simile “parched like a leaf” reduces royalty to something brittle, dried, and organic—once part of a living system, now a husk. The poem suggests that the king has escaped decay only by becoming an object.
The second stanza turns outward from the sealed chamber to the wind outside. “Dust of a million builders’ bones / Informs the wind with grit.” That verb “informs” is precise and double-edged: it gives the wind both information and physical form. The workers who built the pyramid have not disappeared; they have become the abrasive air that moves around it. The wind “lingers,” as if remembering, and then “scrapes with unbelieving fingers / Familiar blocks of hand-hewn stone.” The title now becomes literal: the wind has hands, and those hands are made of pulverized bone. The word “familiar” is the poem’s sharpest turn. It reorients the pyramid away from the king and back toward the laborers who cut each block. The stone is not alien to them; it is something they knew by touch, and now they return to touch it again, not as living workers but as dust.
The poem’s tight construction reinforces this sealed, haunted space. Two quatrains sit like small blocks of cut stone, each using an envelope rhyme scheme—reason/season around leaf/grief in the first, lingers/fingers around the near-rhyme bones/stone in the second. The outer rhymes enclose the inner lines as a tomb encloses a body. But the second stanza’s enjambment pushes wind through the line break from “lingers” to “scrapes,” as though the movement cannot be fully contained by the stanza’s walls. The meter is compressed, with hard stresses falling on words such as “parched,” “grit,” “scrapes,” and “hand-hewn,” so the sound itself feels dry and abrasive. The colon after “its reason” makes the dried king into the pyramid’s explanation; the rest of the poem quietly revises that reason, uncovering a different, more costly one.
The poem’s significance lies in that reversal. A pyramid is usually a symbol of a ruler’s immortality, but Ostrom shifts attention to the unnamed millions whose labor made the monument possible. The king may be “impervious” to time, but he is also passive, sealed away from the world he once ruled. The workers, though reduced to dust, are the ones who still move, scrape, and erode. “Unbelieving” carries an accusation: the dead builders seem to refuse the official meaning of their work, or cannot believe what their hands have become. The wind becomes a kind of class memory, returning to rub against the stone and ask what the monument was for. What endures is not only the dried king but the moving, grit-filled wind—the many hands that built the tomb.