Early on, Brooks displayed a finely tuned, yet accessible poetic vision. A favorite, "The Mother" (1945), looks into the mind of a woman troubled by repressed grief for aborted non-babies. Composed in somewhat artificial rhymed couplets, the text breaks into a liberating candor with the emergence of "I" in the second stanza. As though suffering wavelike contractions, the speaker moves to confession in line 21. With a late-developing reverence for life, the speaker acknowledges through repetition a regret that her lost children "were never made."
A lyric sequence, The Womanhood (1949), draws on structured questions about motherhood. The second stave, "The Children of the Poor," uses the fourteen-line Petrarchan stanza to frame questions of legacy. Implicit in a cry against judgments of "my sweetest lepers" is the mother's self-blame for giving birth to children condemned as "quasi, contraband." Out of kilter is the coming of age of her "little halves" in autumn, when their fruits freeze before ripening. Segueing to a conclusion with "True," she notes that blacks intent on being less black miss the "silver" under their darkness and never pause to mine a "treasure of stars."
