This is the first poem in the collection to take an explicit position on a contested public question, and it should be read knowing what that position is. The subject is abortion. The poem argues against it. The speaker is a child who was never born, addressing the mother who did not have him.

The opening move is a number. One million souls, rejected, turned away before birth, which approximates the annual figure in the United States and which works here the way a statistic works inside any argument, establishing scale before anything else gets said. Poems are usually weaker for counting, and this one is no exception. What follows is stiffer still: no excuse proved large enough, no failure small enough to be forgiven. Both directions close off, nothing justifies it and nothing excuses it, and those lines make their case in the register of a debate rather than of a poem.

Then it does something a reader familiar with the genre will not be expecting. It forgives.

But my soul will greet you, Mother, the moment yours arrives. The reunion carries no reckoning with it. No confrontation waits on the far side, no accounting gets demanded. In quiet solitude, without a word, you will realize the lies they told you. She works it out alone, in silence, and nobody says a thing to her. Then the closing two lines: and I, forever, will love you.

That architecture is what separates the poem from the rhetoric it sits beside. Judgment arrives first, and it is severe. Then the blame moves. The title names the mechanism. Not her lies. Theirs. An unnamed they deceived her, which is what allows condemnation and love to occupy one poem without cancelling each other out. Whether that displacement reads as generous or as evasive depends on what a reader brings to it, and the poem never says who they are.

The strongest line is a small one. The baby smile I would have given you. Every abstraction in the poem collapses into a single specific gift that was not delivered, and it lands harder than the million does. A smile has been recurring across these recent poems as the thing most worth having, watched for at daybreak, shining from a pillow, named outright as a miracle. Here it is the smile that never happened.

Six haiku follow, meant to be read in sequence. The first three open on the number, one million or a million souls, holding the scale in front of the reader. The fourth drops it and begins with never saw the sun. The fifth brings the number back and adds the most arresting three words in the set, I forgive you first, where first means before she asks, before she is sorry, and possibly before she believes anything requires forgiving. The last drops the number, drops the lies, drops the indictment entirely: turned away from sun, I wait where forgiveness lives, silence, then I love.

Track the pronouns while the numbers fall away. The opening two haiku both end on I love you. The third shifts to love remains, with the I gone. The fourth reaches only love, with both gone. Then I forgive you first restores them for a single line before the last haiku closes on I love, carrying no object at all. What began as an accusation with a figure attached ends as an unfinished sentence.

The long poem is strongest where it is smallest. A million souls is an argument. One child, one mother, one smile never given is a poem, and Plahm writes the second considerably better than the first.

A poem with a real emotional architecture underneath an argument, and the architecture is what makes it worth reading. Judgment comes first and it is unsparing, then blame shifts away from the mother onto an unnamed they, and what remains is forgiveness offered without any condition attached. Most writing on this subject stops at the first movement. The baby smile I would have given you is the best line, since it converts a statistic into one specific undelivered gift. Across the haiku, I forgive you first and silence, then I love are both excellent, and the sequence genuinely progresses, shedding the number, the accusation, and finally the pronouns as it goes. What costs the poem is the passages where argument displaces image. One million souls opens on rhetoric, and no excuse proved large enough, no failure small enough to be forgiven belongs to a debate rather than to a poem.