"Incested" - Poem

"Incested"

She learned real young in life,
In order to get by,
She must do what is expected,
And never question why...

It didn't seem to matter
How she felt - or why she cried...
Each time she was incested,
More child-likeness died.

Too young to understand
Why she deserved this thing,
She buried her emotions
And the torture it would bring.

He said that she must never
Tell another living soul -
Too small to know the reason,
Yet she knew she wasn't whole.

She felt it was imprinted
For all the world to see -
I am dirty...I am ugly...
Please...don't look at me.

She'd never heard of shame,
Yet she knew its symptoms well...
The harder that she tried, it seemed,
The harder then, she fell...

She knew she was responsible
For everybody's pain,
So she tried hard to fix it
Over...and over...again.

-Shannon L. Spardlin, "Does God Know About This?" (Henderson, Nevada 1993), 56.

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