None Nuns
2022-06-14

***

Shadows in sheep's clothes,
lead us to the gallows,
to the place before my garden
where lies a freshly-dug hole.

For although my soul quite often haunts
the school where I last belonging sought,
my childhood memory is blank,
tabula rasa, greasy smeared blot.
Something happened I cannot recall,
cannot excise from tangled Yewiffe,
inside the church where under bright lamps
I sweated in so-called sanctuary.

All I comprehend, all that I know
is that there's a ragged hole
deep inside my weary soul
that begs for a sword,
a spear, a lance, some other blade
coated in holy fire that shall never fade
to put me to death in the name of a lord
I would never in my will bow my head to.
A voice with a body I swore off in my youth
deems it romantic, fated, that I subsume
my will to his and accept my place
in a pearly and golden-gilded tomb.

Mother,
will you forgive me after I'm gone?
Will you take these slivers
and remnants of songs
up to the hillside
where derailed my life
and let me one more time those trees haunt?

Oh, who am I kidding?
You never gave a damn about anything I ever wrote
unless as proof that against *someone* I was sinning
and needed to be punished for crossing a line
my brothers could cross as they pleased.

That's all I ever was in your eyes, anyway:
just a pretty doll to dress up and display
as proof that you could keep something alive.
I became old enough to think for myself
and in favor
of my brothers
you pushed me aside
but demanded I alone keep up the regimens:
face sliced, breasts bound, jaw forcibly bent.

And if you could, you'd drive nails through my hands
so never again could I write of the pain,
silenced, perfect sacrificial lamb
in the image of a Son
who deemed all "Other" and "Man".

I could never in a god who hates me so believe.
I could never impale myself on the altar of femininity,
so your hands itch to instead order cut down my favorite tree
to build this gallows. In the wind I could be swinging,
that child again, joyful, carefree.
The wind carries the crow forth and my last words echoing:

Do you love me now, Mother,
now that I'm your martyr?
That you've forever silenced my voice
that wanted to ring so loud?
Do you love me now?

***

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander