Abortions will not let you forget. <br />You remember the children you got that you did not get, <br />The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, <br />The singers and workers that never handled the air. <br />You will never neglect or beat <br />Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. <br />You will never wind up the sucking-thumb <br />Or scuttle off ghosts that come. <br />You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, <br />Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. <br /> <br />I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed <br /> children. <br />I have contracted. I have eased <br />My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. <br />I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized <br />Your luck <br />And your lives from your unfinished reach, <br />If I stole your births and your names, <br />Your straight baby tears and your games, <br />Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, <br /> and your deaths, <br />If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, <br />Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. <br />Though why should I whine, <br />Whine that the crime was other than mine?-- <br />Since anyhow you are dead. <br />Or rather, or instead, <br />You were never made. <br />But that too, I am afraid, <br />Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? <br />You were born, you had body, you died. <br />It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. <br /> <br />Believe me, I loved you all. <br />Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you <br />All.<br /><br />Gwendolyn Brooks<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-mother/
