I Never Knew

Hovel hands dealt you the cruelest cards — call it destiny amiss.

A despotic destination of domestic violence punctuated your life, cudgeling one so undeserving. I failed to fathom the eyesore bruises on your slender arms; toddlers never do.

Maybe you fell from a swing set? The sand pit? Concepts of adulthood were alien to a small child. Ruffian skin grazes were part and parcel to me as a playful boy, except mine paled in comparison to your hellish hematomas.

These panged memories pain me with so much fucking rage at he who shall not be named, coupled herein with a newfound understanding of your plight.

I never knew you were the impossible princess. I miss your shape. I miss you.

Mother and father prattled on at the dinner table, speaking in middle-class tongue-tied did-he-or-did-he-not riddled bullshit. Both knew your husband, my burly man's man grandfather, was a fucking abuser.

The onerous ordeals of nocturnal beatings (replete with black eyes) and so-so-so secretive RAPE rebirthed you as a hollow and hardened simulacrum shell of gloaming. Perhaps that's why you never adored me as a picturesque grandson, akin to my other grandmother.

How could you love at all? When the man you married entered your sacred space sans consent ad infinitum, and that infinity pool of tears stratified such brutish pain.

Women are seen, not heard - Humankind

The mendacious mantra of the late 90s, yet you raised your unseen voice countless times, and no one cared to heed it. Hospitalized with a cerebral aneurysm from "falling from a flight of stairs," neither blasé surgeons nor mal-informed ICU nurses noticed the mottled scars.

A shitty societal caste barred you from safety, just as much (or more) as your gnashing wedded captor.

Now I air hindsight truths with educated gusto. If only the "me" of today could have protected the "you" of yesteryear. If only my physicality, my social conscience, my forensic feminist lens...

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Yet, time is a mightier foe than death. We would have shared, could have shared, SHOULD have shared jubilance until your final freedom breath.

The past has passed. The sun has set.

Mourning remains.

(c) Edward Swafford 2026

Author's Note: I barely knew the woman I should have been allowed to love. Yvonne was mostly kept housebound by my grandfather, and he doesn't deserve to be named.

I hope her spirit is free and not held six feet under by his malicious will in their shared burial ground.

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