Callosity Of The Father

- The Seasons Of Grief: Chapter III - Poem X -

Was any of it real?

The prayers, the hugs, the breath you’d steal

Your righteousness, stoic and pressed,

Always in your Sunday best

Who were you before me?

The same man or teen who lacked accountability

Your solace sought refuge in my dreams,

My nightmares became your schemes

You washed your soul with my youth,

Traded my lies for a dark truth

I don’t even want to mend, I just want to go,

Was breaking me the point or just the afterglow?

I won’t mourn what was lost, but if God can hear,

The callosity of the father is what caused my tears

You showed me off,

As proof, you could create

A child of bronze and faith,

Shaped by the hands of fate

But once the rust had set,

I turned to dust and drudged debt

Your words are as sharp as the crown I bore,

Always cut deeper than the sins you swore

And I don’t even want it back, I just want to know,

Did your anger have a purpose, or was it just for show?

I don’t grieve what we were, but if anyone reads,

Tell this to the man who’ll take my seeds,

And crush them with ease

Were you born to cut me, to mold me into a beast?

Did you ever sleep knowing I went to bed with no feast?

Were you editing my story? When I try to tell the truth?

In twenty-six, will this all be exposed by a red-handed sleuth?

And you’ll say you didn’t do it,

You were just a witness

I lived for your love, but you gave only distance,

I would’ve stood by your side

Instead, I just lied and then died,

You deserve the pain, the hurt, to cry

You’ll burrow in new minds and bury the scars,

You crash through lives like you crashed through ours

I built a bridge out of my crumbled wall,

Your drunken words made the planks fall

You locked me in the temple, a lamb to the pyre,

Preached that our suffering lifted us higher

I stared at the mosaic glass,

Watched my faith fracture from the future to the past

Was I an offering, a price you had to pay?

Or a shadow to hold your guilt away?

You taught me silence was all for men,

That pain was a virtue, that love could condemn

But your hands shaped the void where our bond could’ve been,

Your voice swallows the echo of original sin

If he keeps a ledger, I pray it’s written in stone,

The narrative of how a father turned his son’s tender will to bone

You knelt on the altar, but never to me,

Prayers on your lips, your eyes would never see

You broke me like the bread that was once devoured,

Dried me dry like wine so sour

I wonder if he keeps count of the cost,

How a father’s love left a son so lost

You called me your blood but bled me dry,

Built a kingdom on the rivers of tears I cried

Each argument a whip, each hit a scar,

I’ll work forever to end this undying war

I’d want to die for miles and miles,

If it wasn’t for the enduring trials

You killed me one thousand times over,

Until I found the savior, my lover

Wrote me out of the narrative,

So, you could rewrite how I live

The death of us the prophecy foretold,

I trudged through the barren cold

One day I’ll move on,

What was lost and is now gone

Live happily and give the love that wasn’t returned,

So that my kin don’t have the same yearning

And on a plain day you stay,

My memory, never away

I’ll forget us, but not what you said to your daughter,

Your faith was your crown, your throne a pother,

A kingdom rose, and will fall by the callosity of the father