Parade

My body, my face took the blows

while you just came home pretty.

To watch the carnations in a parade

of coffins in the dreaded graveyard.

Funerals are soft, but death rattles

of breaths, hoarse with effort to cry.

I wanted to go into the coffin, burn like

rubbish, burn the cruelty of time.

Silence Mother and Father’s last cries;

“Don’t let me go, don’t go”