What You Did
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They are not misunderstood.
They are not confused.
They are not “less bad.”
They are not anything
but exactly what they did.
They hit.
They screamed.
They punished with fists
and called it love.
They stripped innocence
from children
like it was theirs to take.
And then they had the audacity
to play the bystander,
to shrug,
to spin a narrative
where they were merely there,
never guilty,
just present.
They weren’t present.
They were active.
They were hands.
They were bruises.
They were breathless,
sobbing nights
no one should ever know.
And still, they stand there,
pointing at someone else’s violence
like a shield,
like a get out of hell card
they wrote themselves.
But they didn’t watch abuse.
They committed it.
With a belt.
With rage.
With silence.
They were never collateral damage.
They were never swept up.
They were the storm.
They were the threat.
They were the thing
children learned
to tiptoe around,
the fear in the hallway,
the consequence for breathing wrong.
They are not lesser evils.
They are simply more cowardly,
too weak to admit it,
too dependent on excuses
to face the mirror they cracked.
They didn’t fail to protect.
They chose to hurt.
They loved control.
They demanded obedience.
And later they wrap themselves in victimhood
because they know
what memory keeps.
They are what they did.
And what they did was evil.
No amount of distance
or time
or revision
rewrites it.
They are not broken.
They are not damaged.
They are not lost.
They are rotting,
clinging to their stories
like they will hold.
But people see.
People remember.
And they will be remembered
for exactly what they are.
They are what they did.
And no one
is coming
to save them
from that.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
