To the Parents of Our Adopted Children

We think of you often–you, the great providers.
Whatever we know of you is little,
something of nationality, something of caste,
but are you dead or alive–in or out of reach?
Could we converse, I mean?
Probably too much to ask, like blood enemies
rehearsing each other’s tactics for the battle,
or the same people bound to the same love–
things too intimate, or embittering, for words.
But if words give out, some images take over.
Strange, how we see you as ourselves (a couple
still failing the national average for divorce)
and often scan the children for your likeness.
Weird reversal, you become their extensions:
the wrists of the elder, full brow of the younger.
We see you in them–I wonder, have we ever met?
Not just by chance, our hands playing over
the same heads of lettuce in the market
or watching the same necrology on the news–
“Do you know where your children are?”–no,
but by some dumb, blind irony of design,
at the same party, jostling at the bar
and trading . . . hardly likely.
I’m afraid we’d move in different circles,
far apart as our children and their traits.
Yet the blue blood has a blowsy democratic streak
and the humbler sports a high and fine hauteur . . .
Noblesse oblige and Yankee upward mobility
begin to meet as siblings–so might we.
But in envy or embrace?

We are the old wrestlers, I suppose,
nature and nurture at it again for good.
Perhaps they’re fully encoded with your genes,
perhaps, with luck, we train and tend their best–
who knows? Some things, at least, are clear.
Our children begin to ask our questions now
and our brooding forms a growing bond between us.
And they’ll have been released two times, not one,
in their young lives: first by you at birth,
then by us when their time has come to fly.
Pray God that each release will lend them power.