Poets on Adoption

No foolin', April is National Poetry Month. Seems the perfect time to share this cool website -- Poets on Adoption.  As the website explains, adoption and poetry go together -- after all, "Adoption is complicated. Poetry is complicated."

The website features poets talking about their poetry, and how their adoption experiences influence it.  The poets also share some of their poems, like this one, Salvation, from Lee Herrick (I'm only sharing an excerpt, you'll want to go to the site to read the whole thing!):

I wonder what songs my birth mother sang in
the five months she fed me before she left me
on the steps of a church in South Korea.
I wonder if they sounded like Sarah Chang’s

quivering bow, that deep chant of a mother
saying goodbye to her son. Who can really say?
Sometimes all we have is the blues. The blues means
finding a song in the abandonment, one

you can sing in the middle of the night when
you remember that your Korean name, Kwang Soo
Lee, means bright light, something that can illuminate
or shine, like tears, little drops of liquefied God,

glistening down your brown face. I wonder
what songs my birth mother sings and if she sings
them for me, what stories her body might tell.

The poets represented include adoptees, both domestic and international, and adoptive parents.