Her warmth once kindled me, thawing the ice mask I wore an armour against the beautiful who would come to me in winter and slay me with lips so soft that I would crush, from the weight they left inside. I was promised a white dress with vows trapped through veils, children already born from dreams who would grow up like me, afraid of the dark sleeping in light trails from the hall lantern that they begged to be left on. I had names for them. All of them Latin with meanings, but now they are called memories alive only in my dreams, where they have her blue eyes, her lips and God calls them bastards but they look like Angels and the part of me in them is an ice mask so cold that it doesn’t melt, not even in hell. From plaited stomach I awake, feeling the void where fulfilment once lay, now a grave, sunken as skull eyes where a widow cuts to feel to finally realize: That love is older than her And that I, was ancient as love lived in me. When she killed it my life was in darkness And there was no landing light, just ghosts of children, all of her demons and a Goddess I worshipped who died at twenty.