Abortions will not let you forget.Abortions will not let you forget. Like other forms of birth and death, people experience abortions differently in different times and places. How difficult or easy a particular abortion is to forget is strongly affected by such factors as age, attitudes of friends and/or family, cause of pregnancy, ease of access, emotional state, ethnicity, family situation, financial status, gender, method of abortion and nature of any complications, nationality, occupation, political beliefs, previous psychological issues and traumas, sexual orientation, support of friends and/or family during the abortion and afterward, race, reason for the abortion, religious affiliation, and religious or spiritual beliefs–and, of course, by abortion’s legal status at the time and the prevailing cultural attitudes toward it.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulpsDamp small pulps Probably a description of a baby because a fetus would not have anything close to hair. 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 sweetBuy with a sweet To buy a child’s good behavior by offering candy..
You will never wind up the sucking-thumbwind up the sucking-thumb A phrase of the poet’s own invention meaning to remove from a child’s mouth the thumb the child is sucking on by using a wiggling, turning motion.
Or scuttle offscuttle off The poet invents an idiomatic phrase by combining the intransitive verb scuttle, meaning to move or run quickly and quietly, and the transitive verb scuttle, meaning to sink a ship deliberately, hence, to abandon or to shelve. ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.Mother-eye This hyphenated word Brooks invents resembles a device common in ancient English epic poems, the kenning. A kenning renames a familiar thing by combining two familiar nouns in a new way—“whale-road” for the ocean or “speech-bearer” for a person, for instance. Brooks brings in the kenning tradition here not only to name but also to reinvent. The “mother-eye” is a new kind of eye, a more powerful, passionate kind of eye than other eyes. The ordinary word eye will not suffice to convey it.
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,Why should I whine/Whine that the crime was other than mine?Gwendolyn Brooks lived in Illinois, where the first law against abortion was passed in 1827. Abortion was made illegal in 1867, and sales of drugs that could induce abortion were outlawed in 1870. Abortion remained illegal in Illinois until the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Brooks wrote of this poem in Titanic Operas: A Poet’s Corner of Responses to Dickinson’s Legacy: “People have been playing with this poem for decades. … In here I believe that there is a little catalog of the qualities of motherhood. And of course you're free to take anything else from it that you need to use. That's one of the richnesses of poetry, that we take from the poems we read what we need.”
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 loved you all. The philosopher Soran Reader points out that mothers choose abortion as a loving act of caretaking, whether for existing children or for children they choose not to have. In the U.S. and most of Europe, many consider abortion a right to fight for against restrictive laws, but in countries such as India and China, millions of women struggle desperately not to have forced abortions—usually of female babies. What these two opposite scenarios have in common is the forcing of reproductive choices against the pregnant person’s will.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved youI loved, I loved you all. According to the poem’s permissions and use language determined by the Gwendolyn Brooks estate, Brooks considered this poem neither pro nor con abortion. “Ms. Brooks left specific restrictions for how this poem can be used. Her intention for the poem was to be neither pro or con abortion. It cannot be used in that context.”
Hear Gwendolyn Brooks read "the mother" and Theodore Roethke read "My Papa's Waltz," with insights by ex-US Poet Laureate Donald Hall.
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Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century American poets. The author of more than 20 books, she was highly regarded even during her lifetime and had the distinction of being the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. She...