#53 The Mother (Gwendolyn Brooks)

Un titular de ayer: "Colombia despenalizó este lunes el aborto hasta las 24 semanas de gestación". Seis meses. Es un escándalo. Hace poco escuchaba a una mujer hablar de las tres mentiras que le dijeron antes de su aborto: Que el feto no era más que un cúmulo de células, que el aborto era un procedimiento sencillo que no iba a tener ningún impacto en su salud, que al salir de la clínica se iba a olvidar todo. Han pasado muchos años y no se le olvida. Las mujeres son tan víctimas del aborto como sus hijos. Que hoy hable esta mujer en un poema imposible de olvidar (o cancelar):

(via)

THE MOTHER

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.