The Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks

 Arbortions will never 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.

Commentary 

The poem talks about abortions and their lasting impacts on the mother. The first stanza is a general observation of what exactly happens to the mother. The persona asserts the fact that the memories of the arbotions linger in the mind of the mother forever. The stanza goes ahead to say that some of the aborted children would have grown to be singers or workers if they lived, but they do not get the opportunity. It goes further to say that there will be no children that will need to be silenced or bribed, barred from sucking their thumbs etc since abortion gets rid of them. In a nutshell, the first stanza is a general observation by a persona who is not involved in the story.

In the second stanza, the poet uses a woman who has done abortions as the persona. She, therefore, says the words from her own experience. She talks of how she has heard voices of her dead children in the wind, imagined her dead children sucking her breasts and has even apologized to the children for having killed them and preventes them from experiencing the sweetness and pains of life. She, however, claims that she had not intentionally killed them. This implies that she had good reasons for aborting them. She does not divulge the real reason for killing them as she did.  She even goes further to console herself that she should not be complaining and trying to give excuses when, after all, the children are already dead and were never even made.

In the last stanza, the persona argues that claiming that the children were never made is also erroneous since in reality, the children were born but never had the privilege to feel what it's alike to be alive. They never giggled nor cried. The stanza ends with her proclaiming her love for the children despite having killed them. 

The poem tries to talk about abortion from an often neglected point of view: that of the woman involved. The poet advents the argument that women don't just carry out abortions without good reasons. They always have underlying factors for their actions. According to the persona, mothers that carry out abortions do not do so because they hate their children. On the contrary, they love them but have no choice.