Map of Scars

Barbed wire necklaces and stars,
tracks of fading scars,
isobars
connecting moments
on the contour
map of life:
childhood memories
of cuts on knees,
silvery stretchmarks
or the ribbons
you made yourself
that held in grief
when the pain
was too much to bear.

Kim M. Russell, 2016

map-of-scars

Image found on Pinterest

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille

This week’s Quadrille is hosted by De and she would like us to write a poem of exactly forty-four words which includes the word ‘scar’.

Scars are souvenirs you never lose,
the past is never far.
– GooGoo Dolls

“I have walked a stair of swords,
I have worn a coat of scars.
I have vowed with hollow words,
I have lied my way to the stars.
-Songs of Sapphique” ― Catherine Fisher, Incarceron

No scars to your beautiful,
we’re stars and we’re beautiful
                               – Alessia Cara

We can use it as a verb, noun or adjective (scarred). We can go deep and dark with it, or lighten it up with a little word play or a hyphen so that scar-let becomes a color or  scar-city becomes something else entirely. We can play with parentheses: scar(f) or scar(e) to give it a double meaning. We can use any tense or variation we like: scar, scarred, scarring, scars: maybe the crescent moon is scarring the sky; maybe we wrap ourselves in our most familiar scar(ves) before heading out into the cold. Maybe our scars are so vast and deep, they have become distant stars.

De encourages us to play around with it and have some fun. We must just make sure to include some variation of the word scar and write a poem that is exactly 44 words long (not including the title.)

46 thoughts on “Map of Scars”

  3. Like Grace, you had me /the ribbons you made yourself/. A lot of us wrote about the internal, albeit invisible scars–0those that we do not often reveal–even to ourselves.

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    1. Thank Bjorn – I’m thrilled you like this one. As soon as I saw the prompt word, I knew what i was going to write and it came almost fully formed – it needed only a bit of tweaking.

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  15. Amazing image….beautiful words. The ribbons you made yourself…this is such a powerful statement. Especially because we usually think of ribbons as wrapping up that bright and lovely gift and here, they relate to pain and grief. Well done!

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