Gifts of the Masters
Liberian Literary Magazine
Gifts of the Masters
In this segment, we run poems from some of the greatest literary masters that ever lived.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS The Mother
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 suckingthumb 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?--
Promoting Liberian Literature, Arts and Culture
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Refugee Mother And Child –
No Madonna and Child could touch that picture of a mother ' s tenderness for a son she soon would have to forget. The air was heavy with odours
of diarrhoea of unwashed children with washed-out ribs and dried-up bottoms struggling in laboured steps behind blown empty bellies. Most mothers there had long ceased to care but not this one; she held a ghost smile between her teeth and in her eyes the ghost of a mother ' s pride as she combed the rust-coloured hair left on his skull and then-
singing in her eyes- began carefully to part it … In another life this would have been a little daily act of no consequence before his breakfast and school; now she did it like putting flowers on a tiny grave.
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