The mother (we were told do comparison for the both poems)

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 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.