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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.

Poem by Gwendolyn Brooks
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Book: Reflection on the Important Things