boomqueen

Title: "Momma" (based on "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath)
Author:

jcathm
Spoilers: Up through 3.17 Maelstrom
Characters: Kara, Socrata Thrace, Leoben
Summary: "Every daughter adores a Sadist, / The hand in the door, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you."
Author's Note: Many thanks to

dionusia for her fabulous beta work, especially her help with rhyme/meter technicalities!

Momma

You do not ask, you do not ask
Any more, black ash
In which I have breathed like a storm
For thirty years, angry and rash,
Barely daring to speak or look back.

Momma, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Cancer-heavy, a fist full of Gods,
Ghastly colors with one red swirl
Dark as a black hole's core

And a storm in the freakish sky
Where it rains yellow then blue
In the clouds above beautiful Delphi.
I used to pray to forget about you.
Frak you.

In the Caprican tongue, in the Picon town
Blown apart in the terror
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My friends in the fleet

Say there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your hand, your brand,
I never could talk to you.
Your fist struck on my jaw.

It struck with a vicious flare.
I, I, I, I.
I could hardly speak.
I thought every Corporal was you.
And their methods obscene

A fist, a force
Twisting me into a machine.
A fighter to Ragnar, Kobol, New Caprica.
I began to think like a Cylon.
I think I may well be a Cylon.

The blood of the Cylon, flesh of friends I thought I knew,
No different from me or you.
With my bitter prayers and my death wish
And my coming back and my coming back
I may be a bit of a Cylon.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Gods-fearing, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat ponytail
And your angry eyes, bright blue.
Leather-neck, Leather-neck, O You--

Not Gods but a maelstrom
So deep no sky could squeak through.
Every daughter adores a Sadist,
The hand in the door, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand in your dress blues, momma,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black woman who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was gone when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to fly
And run far, far away from you.
I thought beyond the red line would do.

But they put me in the cockpit,
And they held me together with rules.
And then I knew what to do.
I found a model of you,
A man in green with a mechanical look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said frak you, frak you.
But momma, I'm finally through.
My destiny come--I'm going back:
I'm ready now to fly through.

If I've killed one beast, I've killed two--
The Cylon who said he knew you
And played my head for a year,
Four months, if you want to know.
Momma, you can lie back now.

There's a lump in your cold black lungs
And the doctors never liked you.
All my bruises and fractures from you.
They always knew it was you.
Momma, momma, you frakker, I'm through.

Cross-posted to