Skip to main content
SearchLoginLogin or Signup

Umbilical Cord

for my adopted son from South Korea

Published onDec 09, 2024
Umbilical Cord
·


Umbilical Cord

When you arrived from South Korea, 
the adoption agency sent over your umbilical cord. 
This purple stump, shriveled like a raisin, 
is clasped in a plastic vise- 
its jawed teeth biting down on that moment 
when you were snipped away 
from your birth mother. 

For almost a year it has followed you from
hospital to orphanage to foster home, 
then across the wide Pacific to our little house.
It nuzzles in the attic now, waiting, 
waiting, I suppose, until you find it as a man
and study its wrinkled shape. This dried root
binds you to a moment of loss, it is the gap
between your two different worlds.

Vol. 40, no. 2, 2012

Patrick Hicks is the author of over ten books, including Adoptable, This London, The Commandant of Lubizec, In the Shadow of Dora, and Across the Lake. He is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University and he also teaches in the MFA program at the University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe.

Comments
0
comment
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?