by oggbashan
and the ways in which the need to be strong chains some thoughts and deeds in a choke of regret for me,
the repeating phrasal rhythm cut out just before it killed the poem, if there had been one more stanza I would have quit reading, but you hammered the point home with out bending the nail. good use of punctuation to control the flow of the read, and enough of a rhythm break out in the last two to force the mind to concentrate on the words as opposed to the sounds.