Parents, Please Learn From What I Here Relate

I’ve forgiven, but how can I forget?

I was not even ten years old but yet

You insisted that I simply had to go,

There was no way I could say ‘No’,

For, in such great fear of you was I

That I could never dare think to defy

Your every order so fierce and stern:

This from infancy you made me learn.

In such awful dread had you raised me

That I could never imagine it could be

That I could choose to refuse to heed

Anything that for me you'd decreed.

And so, I left, as you ordered I should,

Maybe thinking it was all for my good,

Travelling a thousand miles or more,

Not knowing what now lay in store

In the boarding-school that you chose,

This your decision I just couldn't oppose.

While parting, no guidance did you give,

No words of wisdom for how there to live,

For how to manage in that nasty world

Into which you had me brutally hurled,

Me, a child then not even ten years old,

How could you be oh so cruel and cold?

A boarding-school for children of the elite,

An imperialist hangover, a colonial conceit,

Sending me there, my wellbeing you sought,

It'd be good for me, I suppose you thought,

Maybe you felt it would make me strong,

But oh! It turned out to be all so wrong!

You simply assumed, if I’m right, maybe,

That everything was going well with me,

But I never revealed, so you never knew

All that I did and was being subjected to,

The searing trauma and the vile abuse,

And how thus my innocence I did lose,

Even at that young age being led to sin,

The deep, dark pit that I flung myself in.

You’ve just no idea how far astray I’d go,

Perhaps you simply didn’t want to know.

Not once did you ask me what all befell

In what for me proved to be sheer hell.

Now, all this happened many years ago,

So, I’ve forgiven you for it and let it go,

But having said that, I hope and pray

That no little child as I was ever may

Be cast away from their home again

Just as I was when I was not yet ten.

Parents, please learn from what I here relate:

Never play around with your children's fate.