October 14, 2007:
“You were born, you had body, you died.” - The Mother, Gwendolyn Brooks
“You remember the children you got that you did not get.” - The Mother, Gwendolyn Brooks
“We kill what we love.” - Destiny, Rosario Castellanos
“Nobody, but nobody can make it out here alone.” - Alone, Maya Angelou
These poems brought back memories of my visit to “Bodies…The Exhibition” earlier this year. There were nine galleries each displaying different aspects of the human body. One of the rooms featured real fetuses that did not survive pregnancy. Their bodies were so tiny but fully developed within weeks of conception. A friend of mine who once had an abortion may be sensitive to these displays with the knowledge that she terminated what was on its way to living. Having the abortion was a painful experience for her always having to “Remember the children you got that you did not get.” This poem gave me a better understanding of abortion and the emotional consequences it has on women.
Also during this exhibit there was a sign that mentioned how your life is shortened by a specific amount each time you smoke a specific amount of cigarettes. Below the sign was a clear bin with numerous packs of cigarettes. People know that cigarettes are damaging to your body, however they continue to smoke. “We kill what we love.” Someone very dear to me quit smoking after attending this exhibit.
Another one of the displays in the gallery was the body of a man comprised only of his muscular structure and facing him was his skeletal structure, illustrating the dependency of the systems which make up our body. “Nobody, but nobody can make it out here alone.”
Poetry
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. Used with permission. All rights reserved
Alone
by Maya Angelou
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Destiny
by Rosario Castellanos
Destiny
We kill what we love. What’s left
Was never alive.
No one else is close. What is forgotten,
What else is absent or less, hurts no one else.
We kill what we love. Enough of drawing a choked breath
Through someone else’s lung!
There is not air enough for both of us. And the earth will not hold
Both our bodies
And our ration of hope is small
And pain cannot be shared.
Man is an animal of solitudes,
A deer that bleeds as it flees
With an arrow in its side.
Ah, but hatred with its insomniac
Glass eyes; its attitude
Of menace and repose.
The deer goes to drink and a tiger
Is reflected in the water.
The deer drinks the water and the image. And becomes
-before he is devoured – (accomplice, fascinated)
his enemy.
We give life only to what we hate.
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2 comments:
Hi Sha-Keida,
It is interesting that you mention about smoking in your post but I
think the weight are different between quick smokings and have abortion. A lot of time smoking is choice of a person who is hurting his or her own body or one might do not believe that smoking is bad to their bodies. On the other hand, one of question about abortion is that do mother have the right to make the decision to terminate one's life even
it is unborn.
Having kill your own child is a very harsh experience for any mother in any case. We, the outsider, won't fully understand how they feel deeply inside until we are in their shoes.
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