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 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 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 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.