A powerful, agonizing meditation on legacy, this poem is a refusal to be sanitized after death. The author challenges the expected platitudes and elegies, asking if people will “bend the truth to fit their view” and portray them as a saint. The voice demands that tormentors acknowledge “what they did to me first”.
The true story is written on a body “full of scars and bruises,” pages of silent battles. The poem anticipates being remembered as a “poor teenage girl gone too soon”. It is a bitter certainty that the final act of control will be for others to “twist the tale” one last time.
- Will they say I was a saint,
- kind to each soul,
- while in reality every word I spoke in spite
- was an incurable poison, burning in the night?