April Poetry Month: the mother

I have a lot of mixed feelings about abortion. I'm Catholic, feminist, parent, pro-science, pro-consent, aware of the serious impact children have on lives, aware of the stigma of pregnancy... on and on. Again mixed feelings and thoughts...

Anyway, when I started collecting poetry books to look at this month this poem, about abortion, was one of the first one's  I read.  I wasn't going to share it because it seemed too...Well too raw.

Except that it has stayed in me. I have thought of this poem several times since I originally read it.  When poems stick with me I pay attention.  Whatever you think of abortion this poem is powerful.

It is by Gwendolyn Brooks whose books and poetry I love more than I love peanut butter.

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 with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You willl 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 in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim

       killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives form 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 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

Brooks, Gwendolyn,  Selected Poems.  Perennial Classics, New York. 1999. 4