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The Mother
Gwendlyn 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.

I dont really oppose abortion because I feel that you should that right over your body and everyone should have that option, because with all the crap that goes on in this world kids are getting pregnant 13 and sometimes younger than that, and those kids arent able and are too little to have a chile. They are still kids, little kids who shouldnt have to go through having a baby at that age. And think of all those people in the world you get sexually harrassed and raped and what not. What happen if they end up pregnant from their assulter? Will they have to go through bearing the child of the person who raped them? I dont think they should, I do think anyone should. No one should have to go through with something that they do want to go through. This is how I truly feel, and the reason this poem in is my journal is because I think it is a good poem. It made me cry...then again a lot of things make me cry...but still. Even if I dont agree with the message of this poem, I'm still going to put it in my journal.