The decision to do what one thinks may be right for them in the now, often ends up causing regret in the future. The poems remind me of an event in a friend’s life. In her early professional life, she became pregnant, and after a couple months of thinking it over, against the wishes of the father, she decided to have an abortion. “Now’s not a good time for me to have a child,” she said. She wanted to focus on her career and felt that a baby would hold her back. Although I knew her to be career-minded, I was surprised by her decision because she seemed to enjoy children.
In the months following the abortion, she was told she would most likely not be able to have children again. After that she would look at children like one would look at pictures of a long lost loved one. Not long after the abortion, she started cheating on the father of her aborted baby. “I loved him,” she said, “but being with him reminded me of the baby, and I was just trying to ease the pain. He said he would leave, but I told him I didn’t care because I didn’t need anyone.” He did leave and would not go back.
Over that time, she changed, and aged so much. Her every waking moment was spent working, or doing anything, anything, that would stop her from having to think about what had happened. First losing her baby, and then the man she loved. She killed the one’s that she loved, and in turn ended up killing a big part of herself. After that she sang the blues and only after a time did she realize that “Nobody, but nobody, can make it out here all alone.” Within the course of a year, she went from ever joyful to ever under storm clouds. These days, no one has heard from her for a time, but I could imagine her saying “I’m so cold. So cold. And this rainy day represents the feelings that I hold.” All for doing what was right in the now.
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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3 comments:
David,
The scenario you bring, is a very good proof to the point I made in my earlier post. Of course she feels the pain of abortion and will always think of what could have happened if she had not made that decision. Despite that, very often the first decisions are the best ones. It is not easy to weigh the life of an unborn child with years of an upcomming progressing career.
Hi, I agree with you, sometimes people don't know how their decisions today are going to effect the future. They try to relieve anxiety today, the here and now. Sometimes these decisions have grave outcomes.
Hi David,
It is a very sad story about your fried. I hope she will have children in the future, medicine does miracles today. She has to hope too, otherwise she will never be able to have normal life, and nothing will fulfill this lose.
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