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 a 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.

This poem is considered modern because its author was born in 1917.  Despite the controversial topic, this poem gives readers an insight into what pro-lifers say is the mind of a murderess, and to pro-choicers, the mind of a liberated woman.  It does not condemn, it does not advocate, it simply tells the reader the feelings of a woman towards her aborted children.  It is beautiful in its ugliness, and the reader cannot help but feel sorry for this woman whose selfishness?poverty?inability? caused her to abort her children with very much remorse.  The line that says "even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate" implies that she was young, impressionable, and frightened.  Therefore, this poem should be read with an open mind, despite the reader's own morals and beliefs. 

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