The Monster's Mother
Every horror the heroes killed was, to someone, a child
They called my son a monster before he had drawn his first breath.
The poets who sang of his death never asked what name I whispered over his .
He was born wrong, they said, with too many limbs and eyes that held the dark.
Yet when he was small, he pressed his strange face against my shoulder and slept.
I fed him from the deep places where the sun had never learned to reach.
The village above us feared the sounds that rose from our in the night.
But those sounds were lullabies, and the roars they dreaded were only his laughter.
A monster, I have come to understand, is merely a creature someone else has decided to fear.
When the hero came, he wore his the way other men wear armour.
He did not see a son; he saw a that would make his name .
I begged him, at the mouth of the cave, to let the old stories rest.
He answered that heroes are not made by , but by the size of what they kill.
My son did not understand the sword, for no one had ever taught him hatred.
He reached out, I think, to greet the stranger as he greeted everything: with .
The blade found him before could become anything a poet might record kindly.
They dragged his body into the light he had never once been allowed to see.
The crowd cheered a word, victory, that meant, to me, only the end of love.
I have listened, for years, to the song they made of that single afternoon.
In it, I do not exist, or I am a shadow that birthed a horror.
No verse remembers the small hands, the trusting weight, the breath against my neck.
So I have begun, in the dark, to compose a different of the tale.
In my telling, the monster has a mother, and the mother has a right to .
In my telling, the hero is a frightened man who mistook the strange for the wicked.
History belongs to whoever is left standing to speak, and I am still standing.
Let them keep their bright, song for the fires of their crowded halls.
I will keep the truer one, and one day, I promise, the world will hear it.