Tattoo reads, “When words become inadequate, I shall be content with silence”.
There are words waiting: a poem
My fingers, pink side up
Hold stories made of gestures,
Signs and twirls.
The whorls
Of each fingerprint start a chapter, a Sign Language tale.
Violence made me mute when I was younger;
It still returns as an adult – the silence
I surrender
To a fractured part inside my soul.
Another name, another author
Of my life takes hold.
And when I stare at my palms, the lines,
So fractured, divides
Into several paths, many lives
I have carried:
A library of personalities tallied.
My fingers move, my body remembers
Trees towering above me
And a book burning
As another part of me rises from the embers.
