dear mama,
i know of your depression (seventeen years later i've inherited the mental burden) of the arthritis from your mother and the blindness from your father. i know of the shards of glass that ruined your nerve endings which is to say, you no longer feel things like you used to. (emotional or otherwise) i know of the solitary confinement spent on an island [britain] oceans away from home [nigeria]
mama, i know you are disappointed in me each time you tell me i am like my father [your husband] i feel a pang down my chest where the doctors sewed me up. time and time again i am proving you wrong/proving him right.
i don't mean to, sometimes the weight of life is too much, the ache in my shoulder too painful, the beat of my heart too weak — i'm sorry
i love you*
- do you love me too? (no one else does in this house).
YOU ARE READING
the failings of a surgically healed heart | a collection
Poetry「 WATTYS 2019 WINNER 」 the failings of a surgically healed heart, is a series of autobiographical poems arranged into six thematic parts to form a collection which examines the idea of the collective and how that informs individual. i. family an exp...
