A Mother's Love

Gwendolyn Brooks' writing on motherhood is heart breaking in the poem "The Mother" and "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till". In the mother she tells the story of children never born but unforgotten. Children loved but that have never taken a breath of their own. Her pain in the belief that her children had all existed and she'd chosen to end each and everyone of their lives. "You were born, you had body, you died" (Brooks 2877). She accepts that she believes a fetus is a child and yet she has done this more than once, she has ended the life of her children despite her love for them. "Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All." (Brooks 2877). This last line powerful, her use of the word 'All' capitalized to emphasize this has happened more than once and it will happen again, despite her true feelings. How could she do this? How could the narrator commit these acts repeatedly? How could she decide in her mind her willingness to commit them again? 

In "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till" Brooks describes those moments, after it's over "after the murder, after the burial" (Brooks 2882). The stillness around everyone. This was hard for me to read. The last time I'd read about Emmett Till was in my senior year of high school in 2010. Immediately the images and feelings from the day we'd watched a PBS document on the incident flooded to the front of my mind. Angry people in the streets begging for justice, mothers crying holding their children close and the look of fear on peoples faces that something so awful could happen to someone so innocent, someone so young. When his face finally showed in the video, I will never forget that image. Brooks talks about mother's losing their children in both of these poems but the circumstances are very different. Emmett's mother is sorry, she is heart broken and she loved her child similar to that of the mother in the above poem but Emmett's mother did not chose this, her son was taken from her, stolen, and she loved him for longer. So is the connection of the mother in the poem "The Mother" comparable to the connection Emmett Till's mother had to her son? Should the two be compared? Should we even feel sorry for the mother that chose for her child to die when we compare that to the mother who's son was taken from her in such a brutal way?

(Image From) http://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/2013/02/13/lil-wayne-writes-song-disrespecting-emmett-till-family-livid/

Ima

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The Mother's Tragedy

The poem “The Mother” brought tears to my eyes. “You remember the children you got that you did not get.” (Brooks 2). This poem was very moving to me not because I have ever had an abortion but I am a mother and I can understand the regrets in this poem. She talks about the live of her babies that were never born. She stole their birth and their right to life. She is remorseful of their unfinished lives. The babies “never giggled, planned or cried” (Brooks 33). You understand her pain and that she did not decide to have abortions because children were inconvenient but that the decisions might have been made out of necessity and love. She loved all her children. It makes me realize that people make difficult choices and mourn those painful consequences.

I am just guessing but maybe she is a mother already burdened with more mouths than she can feed and the father who cannot or does not take responsibility for them. So rather than bring more babies into the harsh world; she views that it is kinder to abort them. She is a woman overwhelmed by life and rationalizes that the babies are “damp small pulps with a little or with no hair. “ (Brooks 3). She is haunted by her babies’ unfinished lives. At the end of the poem she beseeches the reader to know that she knew them and loved them “All.” (Brooks 35).

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