I was impressed and mystified by these poems that were posted on the blog. I know some of Maya Angelou’s poems, but “Alone”, I was reading for the first time, just like “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks and “Destiny” by Rosario Castellanos. In my opinion, these three great poems are posted and introduced together because they raise questions about life, acceptance, recognition and endorsement. All three poems, though written by women of different race, age and social status, are closely interconnected. In “The Mother”, a woman who suffers after abortion and being tortured by her deeds “Abortions will not let you forget” and “We kill what we love” in “Destiny”, is it not the same idea to show wrong action and battle between right and wrong? In Alone, Maya Angelou shows the reader how important it is to love and to be loved. Money does not one happy. People make people happy in this little world of ours. Love makes this world and we can love ourselves, we need others. Another point of “Alone” by Maya Angelou is that every generation has responsibility to generations before them and after them. As of today, we must help our elderly parents and take care of our offspring, because they rely on us, just like we will rely on their help in the future. And, finally, there would be no future if all women would make abortion, because no children would be born.
When I was growing up, I remember one of my cousins, who were mean and distant. At one time she disappeared and no one knew where she went. Somehow, she was discovered and taken to the hospital. After she got well and stronger, she left our community. However, our family realized that she was pregnant at the time, but because, she was young, jobless, and a high school drop-out, she, by her parents’ advice, decided to undergo abortion. Her reason was that, she would not be able to take care of a child.The more time passed by, the more she regretted what she was forced to do. For a while she became more and more frustrated, angry, and isolated. In her mind she could not forgive and forget what she had done, the child was never born, in her mind she killed what she already loved. Fortunately, she got professional help and she was able to move on with her life, though, the empty spot in her heart after the abortion was never filled.
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:
Your point about Maya Angelou’s poem stressing the importance of one generation taking care of another was very perceptive. You had to really read into the poem to interpret it in that way, and to realize its implied meaning as well as the obvious ones. When she says storm clouds are gathering and the race of man is suffering, I can see the connection to your supposition about the responsibility of one generation to the next.
Hi Gilbert,
It is good to know that your cousin is able to move on with her life. I guess she is very fortune that able to get help from professional not every person can have that. I like very much what you said, "we must help our elderly parents and take care of our offspring, because they
rely on us, just like we will rely on their help in the future."
However, I think it becomes more serious problem not only in America not in other country too because less young people who will take care their
parents like old day from my country. I definally do not see a lot in the US either.
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