Failed Adoption, Michigan

Failed Adoption, Michigan

Kelly Scott Franklin

I can still smell the fields on fire,
when the men burned off the
brambles and put the soil to rights.
We nursed raw throats for days
in the smoke that rose like
bitter incense under a sackcloth sun.
The grass blackened, shriveled,
and blew away, leaving only the igneous stones,
charred feathers,
or the skull of a dog

long dead. For twenty years
and three thousand miles those acres of
Guatemalan ash lay sleeping
until, after two green weeks
I strapped my newborn into someone else’s van,
and ran inside not to watch her disappear.
We bagged up everything and gave it all away
by nightfall, scrubbed out every sign,
stripped the borrowed crib down to the
naked slats and sent it back. But

that night in the dark I ransacked
the house again,
wild for anything that might still bear her smell,
only to catch
in an empty room
a trace of smoke in the air.
And the fields were burning.

The flames went out with the last days 
of the dry season; when the cooling 
cinders drifted down
we missionary children 
laughed and cupped our hands to catch them,
hair singed, our foreheads smudged 
with soot, knowing the first rains could 
fall at last. We knew it then, 

and I think I understand
this bleak renewal-by-fire of life and land.

But some brown days,
the immolated earth and ashen sky
still wonder when the rains will come.

So do I.

---

Kelly Scott Franklin
Poet & Professor

Photography by Lina Verovaya