All My Fears Now Are For My Daughter: A Sestina

Death, that was the big one —
the eternal hiatus, waiting.
I stared down its cleft to oblivion,
terror at my throat like terrible vomit,
and the acid bubbling in the devil’s pit
spat back.

The thing is, you are only half-aware as he rolls back.
You are not thinking about death or the way one
thing leads to another. The smell from his armpit
stains the air and the dreaded waiting
for him to say something rises. That terrible vomit,
It’s not me he wants, you think, it’s oblivion.

Then, sorry mum, as the thwack before oblivion
shatters all my futures. Time winding right back
to how just before you were I used to vomit
your fullness from my belly, darling one.
Long years; sticky purple loneliness and all that waiting.
Then they plucked you from me, like a jewel from a pit.

Now he digs in the mud, shovels a deep pit
where he’ll sling you to rest your final oblivion,
as I stand by the window, as usual, waiting.
No thoughts in your head now. No winding things back
to the point you could have said not this one,
I don’t trust his gait, his stench makes me want to vomit.

In court, he stands over a bucket of vomit —
as though he might retch a not guilty from his stomach’s pit.
On the stand, an American girlfriend says he was The One.
She shrugs an apology, stares off, bewildered, into oblivion.
She’s wondering how she never noticed, yet at the back
of her mind, there was drumroll foreboding, frenzied waiting

for God knows what — All her life perpetual waiting.
Grieving mothers heaving, spattered grief-vomit.
This is what it means to love without going back
to an era when death seemed the blackest pit
from which, no escape, the final oblivion
turns out to be this one.

I stand in my living room playing back old videos. I’m waiting
for the big one. Love’s pressure rises like vomit.
In my heart I dig a pit, sleep there darling, fall into oblivion.