You\'re the mother of my children.
I watched you give birth to them,
I placed them in your arms.
I heard you whisper
\"I hope she\'ll like me\"
With a gentle earnestness
That escaped the deepest part of your soul
You will never be more beautiful to anyone than to me.
I saw the snear on your face as you left us,
Reframing love as abuse
And an unreasonable imposition.
To justify your cruelties.
Oh the savage sea you roiled in me!
Fatherhood my only anchor,
but deep and heavy.
I remembered it in the long night
as I lay in my shipwrecked bed,
with a child clinging to either side.
Their tiny bodies warm
Five and two.
So young to be washed up on my lonely shore.
But safe.
You will never be more ugly to anyone.
I invested everything in you.
You worshiped at the alter of self,
the congregations many
I worshiped at the alter of family.
We chose our gods.
I weighed what I was sacrificing to mine.
I don\'t think you ever did.
Shakespeare anticipated you:
\"sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds\"*
You are the festered lily in my life,
and in your own.
*(William Shakespeare\'s Sonnet 94)