What Feelings Are These?

 July 12, 2003

What feelings are these that make me shiver?

That make me wince and my loins to quiver,

What rape, indignity caused this shame,

Whose indiscretion, who is to blame?

A family secret, an annual event,

Was this child’s body – what purpose lent?

The invisible rapist I feel him quite often,

Abuse of a child, does it ever get softer?

The girl child lives in the woman’s body still,

And presses on due to spirit and will,

Abuse of the child is abuse of her ages

Childhood’s terror led to pain-filled pages.

When they scarred the child did they look to the future?

A sexual act by an angry butcher,

It’s not the youth or the old age lost,

It’s quality and innocence at what grand cost?

They may find the child and have their way,

Did they consider at all what the woman would say?

Did they worry at all of her daily pain?

As a sexual tool she had nothing to gain.

The girl child looks inward and sees lust relieved,

Her body used often, her childhood she grieved,

The child as victim does not stand-alone,

The woman who follows fights her pain to the bone.

A damaged child lasts not forever,

The teen and the woman continue to endeavor,

The child you see is not the only lost soul,

And the woman struggles on less the parts that they stole.

Can’t you see that the lost child grows older?

She becomes a woman carrying misery on her shoulder.

It’s not the one life that is damaged forever,

It’s all of us now whose pain ends never.