10/18/07 7:30 PM
Read three poems, the Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks, Alone by Maya Angelou and Destiny by Rosario Castellanos when I took the #6 train to my account information system class. I am not a mother yet but I can definally feel Brooks’ pain about life after abortion. Life is not the same anymore. A lot of people might not able to recover from it. Some people feel guilty about the child who they suppose to have but never be born. They feel unborn babies talk to them with their immigration. “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed” as Brooks wrote. I do feel some people abuse the right to abortion especially those young teenagers who are lock of education. They do not know some people who try so hard to have a baby. I knew one of my friends’ sister have try couple years to have a baby but can’t not. She had to take so many shots and doctor’s help to be able to have a child.
The other things that get my attention when I read Angelou’s Alone is money can not buy happiness. I do agree it however I think it depends on if people use it wisely. I mean life is not easier but compare the problems that rich and poor people face. It is just sad in some situations. For instance, elderly won’t have to rely on social security, some of them have to get genic Rx because they can’t afford brand name. I knew that through my current job. Or look at some of the victims who died in New Orlando two years ago, they did not get out there like other rich people do because of money issues, they did not know where to go. They could still alive if they have money to stay in motel instead wait for our unreliable government that response like turtle.
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:
Hi,
I found your response very strong. The comment about the government was funny, but true. I also liked how you turned the money issue in Angelou's poem to somewhat of a positive outlook. Society causes the value of a dollar to lose its - value. If one spends money wisely instead of being frivolous, lots of people would be in better situations. Nice post.
Hi Jin,
I really agree with you on the fact that TOO MANY teenagers abuse the option to have an abortion. I am a liberal person, so I am pro-choice, although I don't think I'd ever be able to actually go through the act of an abortion, but I don't judge others. What I do judge is when woman use an abortion as a form of birth control or something. That is a serious act, and all actions have consequences.
My sister-in-law also desperately wants to have a baby after loosing her baby in 2005. She has Lupus so it is hard for her to carry a baby. When you see the desire a woman wants to birth a child, in comparison to those who take advantage of the privileged, then that does sadden me.
Hi,
To my understanding, life after abortion is difficult to cope with. The guilt alone can be enough to send the person into a highly depression able state of life. Especially, if after the abortion, it becomes impossible to conceive. Like you said, it becomes incomprehensible when one hears stories about teenagers who have resulted to the habit of using abortion as a constant prevention. Thanks to education on the subject matter, it has considerably minimize the act.
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