The blue dove on my wrist — shadow of wing
with an olive branch floating above:
from the last night of Chanukah, when we used
Jewish Holiday Tattoos to mark each other with
flags of Israel, six-pointed stars, arks, torahs.
They were funny, we thought, as we sat down
to latkes and applesauce, to red cabbage and blintzes,
and by menorah light compared our wrists.
But, suddenly, gooseflesh. Jewish tattoos?
Sacrilege? Or a measure
of how far we’d come — able to live where
a tattoo was just an ornament,
one that would wash off, leaving only
a faint-green branch borne by a dove of hope.
Susan Terris is the author of “Ghost of Yesterday, New & Selected Poems” (Marsh Hawk Press, 2013). She’s also the editor of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor for Pedestal
