About Work and a Poem

Right now, Job #2 is pretty slow. Because it's the beginning of the semester, we really don't have too many students coming into the Writing Center, and, when we do, it's usually to ask really quick questions or do short sessions to look over their application essays. Those are a lot of fun because I get to learn about the students and just have a nice time of talking to them about what they want to major in, what they want to do with their lives, all those complicated but exciting conversations.

However, there is a lot of downtime right now, so we use that time to catch up on reading for our training sessions and to familiarize ourselves with the kinds of essays the students will be working on this semester. We're going to be seeing a lot of literature papers pretty soon, so we've been looking through the literature anthology to get acquainted with what the students might be reading.

I'm not going to lie. We often end up just reading poems aloud to one another or thinking about staging some of the plays and then deciding not to. Sometimes we read poems and then argue about them. But, the other day, I read this poem, and we were all just so moved by it. I didn't cry when I read it, but I wanted to. Anyways, I thought I'd share it.

Gwendolyn Brooks

"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.