Grace

Grieving for herself, and her baby killed,

Dead child of a child, lays her head,

The flesh she carried, on the table, dead,

The empty uterus, the blood she spilled,

A womb, now colder than the tile floor.

It won’t be long before her sixteenth year,

Only the boy knows, no one else is here.

The nuns have seen this, many times before,

After it is too late to change her mind,

She might have had her eyes, his shade of hair.

The nurses recognize that vacant stare,

Rocking herself, the gown opened behind.

She closed the eyes her fingers cannot trace.

What had she done?  The voices will not rest,

On the table, damning her swollen breast,

And, if she could, she would have called her Grace.