Momma
I can feel
the nails driving into my palm.
Oh Momma,
I haven’t done anything wrong
oh, have i done something so wrong?
They crucify me with words
when my back is turned.
They are wolves, ferocious wolves.
I held them gently like sheep,
they look so similar to sheep.
they bit the loving hand that feeds,
my hands,
and look who’s bleeding now
it’s me.
I thought they were like sheep,
but they’re driving the nails in deep.
And it hurts, Momma,
this pain, Momma,
oh this searing pain.
Momma, I can feel
the nails driving into my palms.
Momma, while we laughed,
they crucified me all along.
These people they shove
every breath from my lungs,
naked, battered,
hands nailed out on both sides
and I
oh I
I am defenseless
and yet still
I will not cry.
They tell me it’s business
and that always takes precedence,
that I will learn
as time goes on
but if that’s education
I prefer ignorance
Oh, Momma,
I can feel
the nails driving into my palms.
They want me begging for alms,
Momma,
I haven’t done anything wrong,
or have i done something so wrong?
Momma,
precious Momma,
I can feel the
nails driving into my palms.
© Sabrina Santa Clara, 1987
The story behind this poem
I wrote this at twenty-two, and I’ll be honest about it: it’s a young woman’s poem, and it wears its wound on the outside. I was a hot mess in those years — trying to hold down a job and climb a ladder while doing the deep, exhausting work of healing from trauma at the same time. When you’ve been victimized early, “victim” becomes a lens; the world arranges itself into crosses and crucifiers, and you feel every slight at the scale of Calvary. I can see all of that in these lines now.
But there was also real injustice under the melodrama. The job behind this poem was a accounting job at a large professional membership organization, where I’d spent months untangling years of financial mess. They had thousands of dollars of members’ overpayments sitting in their accounts — money that wasn’t theirs — and they wanted me to “write it off” and quietly keep it. It was unethical so I refused after which I was fired for “insubordination.” So yes — I was punished for having a spine, and twenty-two-year-old me felt crucified because, in her small way, she’d been made to pay for doing the right thing.
I keep this poem because that’s the whole arc: where I came from to where I am now. The wound was real and the feeling of persecution was real, albeit a bit melodramatic. And those early, brutal lessons in how a workplace can grind a person down are exactly what made me, years later, the kind of manager who protected her people instead. That young me grew up to to build in corporate cultures where no one had to bleed to keep their integrity. I made it. That’s the story