The Tattooed Poets Project: Pamela Hart

Our next tattooed poet, Pamela Hart, sent us this interesting tattoo:

Pamela explains:

"I got this tattoo in 2010 shortly before my son headed off to do basic training in the Army. My husband and I decided to each get a tattoo to mark this occasion. I'd been looking around unsuccessfully for a design and finally found it at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC in an exhibition of Tibetan mandalas. I took a photo, jotted down wall text info and did further research. What I learned endeared me to the design even further, which I already liked because of its textual nature. It's a Tibetan seed syllable -- Dhih -- and is apparently part of a number of mantras. It has to do with thought, knowledge, understanding and creativity. As you can imagine, for a writer, those ideas are important and compelling. The tattoo was done in upstate New York…nothing special about the place or artist."

Pamela directed me to the National Endowment for the Arts website, where I found one of her poems:

In the Red Cross Parking Lot After a Meeting on PTSD

What about your son, Nancy
Flannigan wonders, but really

she wants to talk about her son
Tom in Afghanistan

who never got with the program
six-two, on the swim team

until he was kicked out of high
school, has trouble with rules

which is how she explains
his wild streak, there's his hat

on the dashboard
Tom, she insists

won't make a career of this
Her hand brushes the dark

as spotlights halo the white-domed
rescue vehicles around us

Next door someone shouts
further off traffic glowers

along the expressway. Nancy
sends care packages, the good

socks, how to get them on the cheap
the rifle bolt she bought him

it's expensive, doesn't jam or clog
Tom's sergeant killed, will Tom get

with the program, her words
rocketing on and on in the night

We're like the Spartan women
how we send them off, the shields

we compare and polish
in the concrete firmament

(with permission of O-Dark-Thirty, Journal of the Veterans Writing Project)

~~~

To read another poem by Pamela, check out this one online at the Heron Tree Review. 

Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she manages a visual literacy arts in education program. She is a 2013 NEA poetry fellow and is completing a manuscript of poems exploring the intersection of family, community, and the military. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was published in 2006 by Toadlily Press. Her work has been published in a variety of print and online journals.

Thanks to Pamela Hart for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2015 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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