SCRAPINGS
Again and yet again
he drew the sharpened edge
across the bleeding flesh,
watching as he worked
the little ridge of blood
that pushed before the stone
like some fresh-turned furrowed row.
The muscles of his face
all were tense and tight,
his teeth clamped hard,
jaw line set quite firm,
neck corded near the shadowed wall.
He felt himself a shell,
nothing more, maybe less,
a member of the walking dead,
dismembered from his soul,
only breathing...only...
since his grave was not yet dug.
Tomorrow in the dust
beneath the blazing sun,
beneath the too-blue sky,
he would meet his end
and it would only be, he knew,
a seal on what now was.
But he could never go,
could not take his final leave
still marked by Rome,
still bearing in his flesh
the sign that he was theirs.
The sign that once,
it truly had, ah, yes...
defined him well
and he'd been glad to wear the mark
of what had been the light
in a world of barbaric dark.
But now...now...
it burned his flesh
that it was there
and made his stomach sick
that he had thought it light
and borne it proudly on his arm.
No, he could not die,
still marked by Rome,
labeled as its man,
owned by it body and full soul.
Not when it profaned him,
proclaiming he belonged
to what was now the darkness
and not the light he'd thought.
So close it lay
beneath the other wound
Rome had bestowed on him,
the parting wound delivered
in far-gone snowy wood
on that day of frozen skulls
among the needled bones.
Two wounds from Rome,
a doubled thrust
into his weary heart...
and so his trembling fingers scraped
layered flesh and blood
as all he was and he had been
whirled in his mind.
A mark of his gods?
Yes, it had been so
and the death of gods
comes not lightly to the soul,
and it is only with much pain
we scrape away their marks on us.
For as he scraped
in soundless, silent pain,
he knew the truth of it...
that he did not draw the sharpened rock
merely down his marked arm
that his blood did not simply
ooze down his outer skin.
It was the piercing,
greater pain by far
when one takes a sharpened edge
and by one's will alone
scrapes the inner chambers
of one's beating heart.
Jo Anzalone
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