Even

poem

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

My plan is — and I’m putting this in writing hoping it will hold me accountable — to post a poem every week until the end of the year. I’ve been stockpiling them up, submitting them to magazines and getting rejected — so if I don’t post them here, who’s going to read them?

This one is the most recent.

---

Even

She wanted to kill him,
that morning in the courtroom
when he walked up the podium

to be sentenced, so smug
in his smock and chains, the boy
who murdered her son.

It would have been only fair.
He took what was hers;
she could take what was his.
A life for a life.

Many might wish to tell her
she ought not feel that way,
that she should wrench open her heart

and find forgiveness,
dampen her demons with meditations
and loving-kindness
practises, because hatred

is a poison, it eats you
alive, gnaws you from inside
and spits out your bones.

But she doesn’t want to forgive.
She watches him up there –
is that a smarm of smile on his face? –
and imagines the squeeze of his heart

in her fist, the dull crack of his skull 
on the panelled wood of the courtroom walls,
the juice pouring from him.
She wants to get even.

---