Your Betrayal Poem by Diana van den Berg

A sea of broken paper-words,
blowing in my face,
fragmented, scattered wide;

you gave me
your quiver-heart
and songbird soul
in return for mine
and we loved and shared and laughed
and cried and sang and danced
and wrote poetry to each other;

then you took back
your heart and soul,
unannounced and casually,
and discarded mine
carelessly
with the trash,
and crunched the marrow of my bones
underfoot,
and didn’t take the time to tell me,
for I no longer mattered,
and you had forgotten me,

and you left me with a gaping emptiness,
raw-edged and frozen,
and blood-tears dripping from
where my heart, then yours, used to be.
I was a book you closed
and put back on the shelf.

How could you do this to me?

(20 September 2013)