the mother Language and Communication Quotes

The poem begins in a pretty intense way. What makes it so intense, you ask? We think it's that "you" in the first line. That "you" involves us, the readers of the poem, and thus implicates us in the stakes of "the mother." The speaker isn't the only one who is trying to figure out her relationship with her aborted pregnancies. Her language puts us in that same position too.

Here the speaker addresses her "sweets" directly, and she says that she "seized" their lives. These lines tell us that then speaker believes that her terminated pregnancies did have a kind of life—even if those pregnancies never reached birth.

Woah, here's another intense moment. The speaker puts it all out on the table, and refers to her abortion as a "crime." There's no ambiguity in her language here.