The Mother
(first line omitted as it will change the tone i am trying to bespeak)
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.
DP3S,
I am sorry for anything I may have done to inadvertently hurt you. I wish I could have stayed longer to explain myself. I am leaving because I have to. I am not leaving because of the students. I love you all. If I could I would bend to give you your every wish. Of all the children I have ever know you all had the most heart. You have stolen mine and for that I am sorry you cannot see how much it hurts me to have left you so quickly with some many unanswered cries. I cry as I type because all of your small idiosyncrasies make you the lovely individuals you are. I was once in your shoes. I was milling around waiting for someone to save me; pick me up and hug me. I realized in time that I needed to be my own Ayler.
All of my love to you.
Ms. Dana
