*Create a written response of a paragraph or two of at least 150-200 words
*You may use the following questions to develop a response to your poem, or you may discuss another more appropriate literary element (e.g., imagery, characterization, theme) as best fits your selection:
1.What are some of the key symbols or metaphors in the poem, and how are they used to convey meaning to the reader?
2.How do these elements enrich the poem and deepen your understanding of its themes?
3.What is your reaction to the poems content and language? Would you recommend this poem to friends?
*Tips
Remember to provide evidence for your claims in the form of quoted passages from the poem. Quotations, paraphrases, and summaries should be cited according to APA rules of style, including in-text and reference citations. Quoted material should not exceed 25% of the document. Check grammar and spelling before posting
SEE POEM BELOW:
tragedy of abortion, the bitterly hard choice under fearful pressure that ends with a rifled and bleeding womb and shreds of crimson life. I have been told that women understand abortion as violence, as a desperate violence inflicted by a woman not only upon an embryo but upon herself.61 Perhaps the assump-
61. Consider also the poem, The Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks, in her Selected
Poems (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 45:
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.
