KWEE Liberian Literary Magazine Jan. Iss. Vol. 0115 May Issue Vol. 0515 | Page 59

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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