The Mother

“the mother” is a deeply introspective poem driven by the speaker’s internal reckoning. The shape of the poem follows the stream of consciousness of a would-be mother attempting to make sense of the emotional fallout of several abortions. The paradox of having and not-having these children is introduced in the second line: “You remember the children you got that you did not get” (Line 2). The use of the second-person pronoun “you” throughout the first stanza creates an imagined dialogue between the speaker and herself. This address creates distance between the speaker and herself at the beginning of the poem, allowing her a somewhat more objective way into the difficult topic at hand. She states the truth of her situation simply, as if she were an observer. The simple fact is that these children would never work, never be married, never laugh or cry or suck their thumbs. Still, this objectivity only lasts for so long. By the last couplet, the speaker’s descriptions betray a consuming love for the children with her use of food-adjacent language: “luscious sigh…a snack of them…gobbling mother-eye” (Lines 9-10).