Politically Incorrect Poem Found in Textbook

In college I once had the misfortune of repeating a class. I don't recommend failing a class because you personally loath the teacher. Granted, there were other things going on in my personal life at the time, but hindsight is clearer once you pay money for the same class twice. One also learns that you are not likely to get a teacher with balanced opinions teaching a humanities class in an art college in Detroit.

Anyhow, I ended up with two textbooks in the end. Not two different text books, but both the third and fourth edition of the same textbook. I fell for the new teacher's insistance that the fourth edition was better and that having the same page numbers would be beneficial to following along in class. Yes, I can be a sucker.

Flipping through one edition and then the other not long ago, trying to decide whether I would eject one or both books from my personal library, I noticed an interesting poem that we hadn't covered in class. It was in chapter 36 of "The Humanistic Tradition" book 6 "The Global Village of the Twentieth Century" by Gloria K. Fiero. The chapter title was "Identity and Liberation". I beleive the only reason the poem made it into the book at all is because it was written by African American Harlem Renaissance Poetess Gwendolyn Brooks. I'm sure it didn't hurt that she had previously won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Rather than trying to describe what I had read I will present Ms. Brooks' poem to you.

"The Mother" 1945

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 the 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 have 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 and lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginning 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.