Howard Nutt's "Hands" begins with an admission that sounds almost childlike: "Today I was frightened by a waving of hands." What follows is not a ghost story exactly, but something close to it. A speaker standing in the open landscape of Illinois sees, or imagines, hands in the grass: red, brown, white, a whole "history" and "legend" of them. The poem circles one unsettling idea. The land outlasts everyone who has claimed it, and the people who crossed it, native and settler alike, are still there, underfoot, in a kind of patient and not entirely friendly presence.
The first stanza builds its setting with a sweep of weather. The wind blows west, the sky is "ribbed with blue and grey," and it meets the prairie "like a folding arch." That last image is worth pausing on. A flat landscape has no walls, yet the poet gives it architecture: the horizon becomes a vault, the sky and ground fold together into a hall. It prepares us for the poem's later suggestion that this place is something like a tomb or a cathedral. Then the tone shifts. In the middle of all that grand, grey space, the grass moves with "a sad waving of hands." The word "wistful" in "a wistful mist" is a quiet masterstroke, because it gives the dead a feeling, a longing, rather than simply a menace.
The poem's structure mirrors this uneasy meeting of the vast and the personal. Nutt writes in free verse, with no regular rhyme scheme and lines of very different lengths. Some stretch out like the prairie itself, while others shrink to fragments. The line "A history / a legend of hands" breaks apart on the page, with big gaps of white space, as if the speaker is stepping carefully across ground he doesn't trust. Repetition does the work that rhyme might otherwise do. "All day the wind blew west on Illinois" returns near the end in the present tense, "All day the wind blows west," so that the wind, which began as a past event, becomes something ongoing, a permanent condition of the place. The sentence "The prairie has you now" is also repeated, and each time it lands like a verdict.
Look, too, at how the poem handles its two kinds of people. The earlier travelers "swept her like a wind" and "darkened her like a cloud shadow," images that make them natural forces, passing and temporary. Their hands, once strong, are now "soft with mold," a grim, physical detail that refuses to romanticize the dead. Yet the poem doesn't mourn only one group. By naming "Red hand, brown hand, hand of the white man," it lumps conquerors and the conquered into one chorus. The final voice makes this explicit: "We, too, are the hands of men who came, who conquered." The word "too" matters enormously. These are not simply victims. They are people who also took land, and they too were swallowed by it.
The ending turns the poem's fear into something stranger. The hands beckon the speaker "into the grass and under the grass," but then refuse him: "Not you, you shadow-caster, / You of the lean white nervous hands, not yet." The speaker is defined by his own hands, thin, anxious, and modern, in contrast to the weathered hands of the past. The phrase "not yet" is chilling precisely because it is gentle. It is a postponement, not a mercy. Meanwhile the closing images, "a heartache of sunshine" and "a cataract of wind," pile up in a kind of overwhelmed rush. Sunshine, normally comforting, becomes a "wilderness" and a "heartache," and the odd compound "here-to-sky of grass" stretches the landscape outward until it has no edges at all.
What makes the poem lasting is its refusal of easy answers. It doesn't scold, and it doesn't offer consolation. It simply lets the land speak, and what the land says is that every claim of ownership is temporary. For a reader today, standing on ground that has belonged to many people in turn, that quiet, waving warning is hard to shake.