The Mother

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 Mother tells of the speaker's lamentations of abortions past, and the feelings she harbors because of these abortions. She is haunted by what could have been: "You will never wind up the sucking-thumb/ Or scuttle off ghosts that come." The speaker feels as if she has stolen the lives of the aborted, referring to them as her "dim killed children." There is a clear mood of regret, sadness, and remorse as the speaker ends the poem saying "I love you all."


One device utilized in the poem is repetition in the last stanza. There is also repetition of imagery and themes--- tears, death, love and memories that would be. Rhyming is also present in the piece which follows AABBCCDD... etc. until the last stanza.