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.

Summary of “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks

The poem begins with the haunting declaration that “Abortions will not let you forget.” From the very first line, the speaker establishes that the memory of aborted children lingers permanently.

She reflects on the children she conceived but never got to raise—“the children you got that you did not get.” She imagines their tiny, fragile bodies, some barely formed with hair, others still in an early state. She sees them as unborn singers, workers, and human beings who never experienced life.

The speaker continues by imagining all the things she will never do as their mother. She will never neglect them, never silence them, never bribe them with candy. She will never watch them suck their thumbs or chase away their bad dreams.

She will never hold them with a protective mother’s gaze, feeding them or enjoying their presence. These lines underline both the loss of motherhood experiences and the painful reminder of what could have been.

She then shifts to a deeply personal confession: she hears the voices of her lost children in the wind. She imagines herself nursing them, even though they never lived to feed. She addresses them tenderly as “dim dears,” acknowledging that they never had the chance to breathe, play, love, or grow.

The speaker admits that by choosing abortion, she stole their potential lives, their names, their joys, and even their deaths.

Despite her grief, she insists that her choice was not made lightly. She acknowledges that she made the decision deliberately, but it was never done in coldness or with cruelty. Here, she faces a paradox—she both accepts her responsibility (“the crime was mine”) and questions how to explain the complicated truth.

She wrestles with language, trying to find the right way to say that the children both existed and did not exist. She concludes with a painful recognition: the children were real, they had bodies, and they died—yet they never experienced the simple joys of life like giggling, planning, or crying.

In the closing lines, the speaker turns to a direct and emotional plea. She insists that she loved all of her unborn children. Even though she only knew them faintly, she repeats: “I loved, I loved you all.”

The repetition emphasizes her sincerity, her grief, and the contradiction of her position as a mother who never raised her children but still carries deep maternal love.