Marked
Silence flows through the room
Nothing but the paintbrush uttered a word
My eyes unravel your cocooned canvas
Though the piece not penned, the butterfly so bashful
refuses to leave its earthen shell.
Grasping your hand
our pupils lock
and the whole room halts and
melts away.
Your eyes want to tell me you’re ready
but your hands,
your hands they
shake away that notion
quicker than I can second guess.
Then quickly it sieges the scene
paintbrush whirring
and snarling
Your eyes plead to intervene
but as the guardian of the garden
I ease the butterfly from its hand-spun cell.
Bare and vulnerable
I cradle your hand
but you feed me your whole arm instead.
“Hush little butterfly,
have you no reason to be scared?
Your wings are marked
and marred
and branded
such that I could never know,
how is it that you quiver so?”
Yet as the keeper
of this creature
whose canvas possessed
such vibrant features
I’d never thought that
when I’d meet her
she’d fear to add another.
“I cower not from the pen
from which the fear was wrought
but pain from past
unveiled at last,
made peace with, I have not.
Absent scars I am
marked
to paint what was
for nought.”
To every brave soul who decides to embark on the endeavor of marking themselves; to all those with tattoos.
