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Sunday Weekly Review

January 22, 2006

(Archive)

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  • Vicky January 26, 2006 7:05 am

    The Mother
    by Gwendolyn 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.
    From A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks, published by Harper & Brothers. © 1945 by Gwendolyn Brooks.

  • Vicky January 25, 2006 5:29 am

    Mark – Can you help me out with the exact words of a quote and tell me if it is from Plato?
    “Justice is deaf, dumb, blind and hungry…”
    ??
    Thanks.
    (And “rangyk” – Is that you hiding behind that name Dave G? If so, you’re a little chicken not to address me personally…but whomever you are, what’s your gripe now and what am I lying about?)