Elegy on the Things We Never Knew

for my fellow adoptees

Don’t try and keep the past alive: it’s long

since dead. Place a sign around its neck:

Do not resuscitate. Burn photographs

you never had, whose faces you will never see.

Inter home movies which you never watched

in some dark, silent tomb marked Not For Me.

The Christmas cards, the birthday presents, none

of which were bought or sent, the family jokes

you never heard, the memories you never shared,

the holidays you never took, the homes

in which you never slept, the promises

you never made, or tried to keep, or never kept,

the loving words which went unsaid, the absent hands

which never touched a single hair upon

your precious head; and all the things that never were

and all the things that might have been: take them all!

and drown them in the ocean of your grief.

Do not look forward yet: the future is

as unknown as the past you never knew.

Instead, be here. Breathe. Live. Love. Laugh. Don’t stop.