POEM: The Sin-Eater Speaks
This poem sits alongside my short story The Sin-Eater’s Daughter, drawing on the same themes.
They lay the bread across her chest still warm from baking, salt-edged, dense and I'm meant to take her darkness in. What they don't know: I've grown fat on it. Grown fond. Some sins taste of iron. Some of smoke. Hers will be butter-sweet, a child's lie she fed and fed until it grew teeth, until it bit back. I've eaten murders tasting of honey. Adulteries watering my mouth for days. The small sins are nothing stolen coins, petty cruelties. Ash. I spit them out. But the ones they can't name? The ones that fester? The husband's hand she didn't stop became the daughter's broken wrist. That sin has roots. That sin has weight. That's the one I'll savour. The bread is cooling. They're already turning away, thinking her soul scrubbed clean. Fools. I don't absolve them. I take sins because they're mine now. Her cruelty lives in my belly, walks in my bones, and when I die, no one will eat for me. I lift the bread. I eat. And I'm not sorry.
Hmmmn…loving the multiple layers present in your poem’s depiction of this solemn assembly. Given it’s the cultural norm, the deceased lived and died with the certainty their sin would be eaten, taken, absolved; the family and mourners carry a sense of entitlement, because whatever the ‘price’, they’ve paid it, they’ve baked bread, and the sin-eater will fulfil her calling. Yet, beyond the exterior, it’s intriguing to hear her hold secrets about the efficacy of the process that no one else is privy to. I want to know more…how did she get there? Or is her internal discourse her own escape and denial of her obligatory service, giving herself at least some power over her situation? This is beautifully written and definitely captivating!
This felt like a tormented soul speaking through to me an ancient incantation. A ritual of torment.