The Beauty of Maternity

TW!!! Mentions of physical and emotional abuse

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This is a poem I wrote for an essay! It's quite a sad one but I put a lot of effort into the form and rhyme scheme which I don't usually do. Please heed the trigger warnings, and most importantly enjoy :)

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Your hand is soft against my skin

The first to hold me my only kin

Our love will never be severed

Your little girl I’ll be forever.

Your hand, like a cat's tongue, I flinch

Your love burns like spitting venom, I’m sick.

The pain remains from the

Soft hand, soft love, welting.

I grew stifled by your bullying,

Expectations I could never reach.

Your biggest disappointment,

Black sheep.

I was your little girl for short, fleeting moments,

Growth takes place in the cracked skin, you’re frozen.

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Now some context! Please don't let this influence the way you perceive the poem, create your own meaning. You may have noticed, it's a purposely failed attempt at a Shakespearean sonnet form, it has the form in way of stanzas, 4,4,4, 2, but it loses the other elements of the traditional form. I did this because the sonnet form is traditionally to present love; familial, platonic, and romantic. This poem is about love in a way but definitely not a healthy kind. I like to explore the relationship between mother/child and the ways it can go wrong.

The first stanza is misleading, this presents the traditional and desired relationship. It has all the good bits! Even rhyme scheme, even iambic pentameter, a steady and simple form. As you can guess, this dissolves in the following stanzas, losing the steady rhythm and rhyme as the narrator becomes more emotional and unsteady. I won't bore you with every detail, but I will finish on the final couplet. The couplet shadows the first stanza with a half rhyme, the gist of the couplet is to show that the narrator is improving and growing, healing from past abuse while their mother cannot. The road is long, and the narrator has a long way to go.

Thank you for reading al of that! Any form of feedback is welcome; criticism, your interpretation, poetry you write/like, anything at all!

Sparrow