International Adoption

A child's hand is trusting. It grasp the air wanting to be held.

It has not yet known the heartbreak that leaves callouses.

Adulthood has not left it's scars across their knuckles.

I see these children and my soul calls out to them.

I try to reach for them but my arm is not long enough.

For you see, these children have no hand to hold.

They are across the ocean where I can not help them.

I see them and hear them in my mind's eye,

But I have neither the power nor strength to reach them.

The are going to fall with no one there to catch them.

The bruises slowly form on their pure little hands.

Mirrored in my own soul are these painful marks,

Each one a pebble stuck just underneath the skin.

A constant reminder whispering out to me one word.

Help.

Help they cry to me and that is what I desperately want to do.

I am not alone in my pain for these children.

Their are many open palms from where I call home,

That are written over with the wisdom of their years,

Still waiting for that hand to hold.

But who shall bring this hands together?

The young and the old. The child and parent.

I will.

I will cross the boarders real and imagined.

Language will not hinder me and prejudice shall yeld,

Because hands all speak the same language.

I dream of orphans who simply become children,

And adults who wonderfully become parents.

So send me across the world with the backing of my nation.

Give me a message of love to deliver.

Let me be the wanderer who brings the children home,

Protecting their hands across the journey

Until the find the one they were always meant to hold.