Gwendolyn Brooks
1945 The Mother
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 no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the hair.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the thumb sucking.
or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for snack of them, with gobbling mother eye.
I have heard the voices of the wind, the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breast that they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
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 beginning 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 a 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