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for my adopted son from South Korea
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