WALKING AROUND
IN ANOTHER'S SKIN
Poem for Today - April 16, 2015
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.
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© Gwendolyn Brooks