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.
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 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 know you, though faintly, and I loved. I loved you
All
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Adopted: October23,1999