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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