Gosh, this is really powerful. There is a lot to be taken from this, but what hit me the most was the alien judging another culture by her own standards, and paying out her retribution, along with the entirety of a group being punished for the actions of a single member. This speaks a lot to history, it is something we have seen again and again.

Telling it through the lens of a woman and her daughter, left without their father makes this so much more relatable and the poem itself is so beautiful! I adore that I got both a story and a poem here <3

I suppose we already don’t need men to reproduce, and there are sperm banks stocked with literally generations worth of babymaking, but turns out we aren’t even that far from men not needing to be involved at all.

What strikes me the most is how everyone is punished by a being that seems to hold herself superior, she thinks she is ridding the planet of these monsters who attacked her, and her people waged a war to do it. From Jane’s perspective, her husband died for that, but was no part of it, that was representative of the artist who’d loved her like no other. This sincerely thought provoking, thank you very much, really enjoyed this entry.