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.
This line starts with a grotesque image of the speaker talking about making “a snack of them (the unborn children).” As if children provide crucial nourishment to the mothers that they cannot survive without. Also, the use of “mother-eye” sounds a lot like mother-I when spoken out loud and this line could be discussing the mothers desire to compile her children’s identity into hers. By making “a snack of them” she consumes her unborn children and makes them part of herself.
The Mother