Tattoo

She feels the needle embroidering her skin,
as if her heart is made visible at last.
This one is a rose and dagger because
Love is a beautiful and a dangerous thing.
She is a map of Love's demise,
her skin a pattern book of necromancer art.
Outside in the Frankfurt streets
cars are nudging towards the city's heart.

Locked in the mirror's loveless glance
she remembers her first one, clasped
in a uniformed convict's arms
like some tribal dance, the needle punishing
her dreaming, a Braille of blood
branding her a prostitute, a refugee, a Jew,
this lace-making with her body to carve
the jewelled crimson of a new tattoo.

Sometimes, looking at the tapestry of her veins,
she sees that she has made something after all
of a life lived between the boundaries,
pushing onwards to the last taboo.
She likes to imagine herself lying at rest,
age-marked with dignity, her rose
as fresh as the day it was etched on her skin,
the only beautiful and wholly perfect thing.

© Jacqueline Mézec

(This poem was placed third in the Kent and Sussex Poetry Society Open Poetry Competition 2006 and published in their Poetry Folio 60.)

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