Poem: 'Lavinia'

 by Dawn Sands

 

(image: Royal Shakespeare Company)

‘She hath no tongue to call, or hands to wash;
And so let’s leave her to her silent walks.’
   —Demetrius, Titus Andronicus

They lie on the cold stone slab, 
the hands: skeletons wrapped in paper porcelain
with the skin peeling off around manicured nails
and the faint white line on the tip of the thumb,
a story told in birthmarks and burns,
the delicate anguish of childhood years
as she wailed for her mother, a moment too late—

—the scar would remain there for life. The first injury.
The first indication of what was to come,
the blue-grey tinge on the porcelain, 
a marbled effect, the admirers would say,
the designer has exceeded himself,
as critics examine the stark juxtaposition
of white against red,
the bloodied stumps where the wrists should be.

Scarlet, like the lips of her undoing
and the tongue which lies discarded on a sheet.
She brought it upon herself, the child:
as her own writer said, blood will have blood,
a body will have a body,
a woman will have a porcelain statue
whose hands now lie cold on a slab.

And they leave her now to wander alone,
arms bare and elegant and bound by rope,
eternally stripped from the slender hands 
unable to cover the signature flourish:
a sanguine stream of eternal scream
from a gash of condemnation 
in that innocent red mouth.