The Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks

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.

[@pepemoreno4397]

Woo! it hit deep. The sorrow in her voice, the stops, the continuity.

[@donnagjoka2587]

It's the reason i love black culture..they speak by soul's..they are original..never copying..❤so true..

[@shakesrear7850]

where is the famous reading? I had it but lost it.

[@lordjoaodiniz]

Whose is this voice?

[@SomeGuy-cw9rw]

She missed a couple lines.

[@SomeGuy-cw9rw]

Ruby Dee?

[@jennydavidson5080]

I think so but I wish I had confirmation!