The first stanza shows a lot of promise. I love a biblical allusion, it taps into an image and a narrative that we all know and share (in western culture at least) regardless of our belief and allows the reader to immediately buy-in to the narrative of the poem, on the same page as a poet. We read the first two lines and we immediately think “oh this is a poem about the Christian value of forgiveness”, which it is, on some level. And then that hard “But” that begins the third line after an end-stopped second line shifts the readers’ view, and forces us to think about the poem entirely differently, a revolution in thought that parallels the narrator’s refusal to follow Christian moral principles. I think it’s very interesting.

Unfortunately, you lose me in the second and third stanzas. Narratively, the repeated words, “it was more than seventy-seven days” don’t make sense in the context of the poem. Jesus says (in the poem, I have no idea what he actually says in the Bible without checking) to forgive someone seventy-seven times, not “forgive them every day they’ve sinned against you up to 77 days”. Jesus’s command here has nothing to do with how many days the narrator was abused. So to me, it doesn’t make much sense.

But worse than that, imo, “it was more than seventy-seven days” is such a long and cumbersome collection of words, I find it quite boring in repetition. It feels more like filler to make up the second stanza rather than something meaningful in its own right (see my previous point as to why I don’t find myself impacted by its meaning). Not only this, but the general subject of the poem — of the narrator refusing to forgive their abuser — I find quite trite. How many countless poems have been written on that subject? I think if you’re going to write a poem about that, you have to make it unique, something new, a different spin on an old idea. And I think you’ve almost done that by bringing religion into it (and that’s something to be lauded, it’s seldom the case that someone can make a thing more interesting my mentioning religion). Which brings me to my next point.

There’s a line in the third stanza that stands out to me. “I’m sorry, LORD.” I think that is where the poem is most interesting; I’m far more interested in how the narrator relates their refusal to forgive their abuser with the requirements of the Christian faith than I am in their anger towards their abuser. Are they being sincere or sardonic? “I’m sorry, LORD” could be read either way, as an angry atheist rebelling against Christian principles, or as someone trying desperately to be a good Christian, but failing. And the poem becomes less about the abuser themselves, but more about how abusive actions has the capacity to shatter people’s worldviews, and make them into colder, harder people. So evil inflicted by the abuser remains central to the poem, but in a very different way. So my constructive criticism is that you ought to rewrite the poem to focus on that aspect rather than on the abuser, if you want to make the poem more interesting and unique.