This poem is dedicated to all survivors.
Hero
By Nathan Corliss
You could have let what happened to you destroy you.
In fact, no one would have blamed you if you did.
Since an apology would be an admission of guilt, you have the lingering torment of not being begged for forgiveness by all involved parties as you rightly should be.
Many people follow this darkness and commit 30 year suicide through cirrhosis or pills.
Not you though.
Your strength is in your ability to bend. Like bamboo in a storm you rock and sway dramatically but never break.
Don’t despise your self-righteous protectors who bark about justice, but have no teeth.
They want what’s best for you, yet they’re somehow blind to how their calls for justice and lingering spite act as cattle prod reminders not allowing you to move on.
Yet you persist. Weary, yes. Sometimes troubled.
But, you are brave.
You are strong.
You are my hero.
I would like to know about your poem and its subject. I find it difficult to define “Hero.”
It’s for anyone who did not and will not get an apology, but who has the courage to exist on. I think about survivors of the Rwandan Genocide, people in Cambodia, whose president is literally a former member of the genocidal regime, and more micro instances of injustice and abuse where perpetrators and enablers walk free. The people who make the choice to exist despite these ongoing injustices are heros to me.