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 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.

The author starts this poem by asserting  “Abortions will not let you forgot,” and continues to talk about the aborted life. I find the title “the mother” somewhat intriguing because this is the story of a woman who went through abortion, who is not a mother. The detailed description of the mother’s feeling towards the unborn child shows the suffering the mother has. “singers and workers who never handles the air” “you will never scuttle off ghost that come” “dim killed children.” What I get out of this poem is that she tries to convey that even though it was the mother’s own choice to not to give birth, she still attempt to revivify her dead child and by telling the children “I loved you all” and “even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.” Abortion is always a difficult subject and writing a poem with such emotions has to be hard for her. For someone who is prochoice like myself, this poem gives me an image of the difficulties and an enlightening view of the other opinion.