Untitled Document

The Mother

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

the damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

the singers and the workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet,

you will never wind up the sucking thumb

or scuttle off ghosts that come,

you will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard the voices in the wind the voices of my dim killed

children.

I have contracted. I have eased

my dim dears at the breast they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, If I sinned, If i siezed

your luck

and your lives from your unfinished reach,

if I stole your births and your names,

your straight baby tears and your games,

your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches and

your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths

believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine! --

Since anyhow, you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

you were never made.

but that too; I am afraid,

Is faulty, oh what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me I loved you all

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly and i loved, I loved you all.