Elegiac Roots of the Unknown

🌳Children Without Roots feel caged in pastel shades of not knowing

They walk through fields of borrowed names, searching in gray hues

their laughter untethered, their shadows seeming different - yet same.

They seek ancestral roots to clutch the soil of their memories,

Yearning branches to shelter, tender voices echoing stories retold.

But the wind whispers soothing secrets they cannot hear,

The time-honored songs of the foregone, lost to the years.

Faces in photographs blur and fade,

a lineage unknown, forgotten, a silence made.

They build their homes from shifting sand,

For they are hopeful for a guiding map,

an adoptive mother’s hand. A father who gives all

Yet in their eyes, a spark will still linger - a knowing

a yearning for soil that nobody knows or just forgot to tend

They become children of echoes, children of sky,

they carry the questions they cannot deny.

Though the tree is hidden, its spirit remains,

a pulse in their veins, a ghost in their names.

Some roots and branches exist in shadowy realms

Buried so deep, still, futilely we try to dig,

unearthing their tendrils - an impossibility

Mothers and fathers, denying consanguinity of biology

Abandon their children to the care of strangers

Some parents, alas, are no longer counted amongst the living

We watch these children in our care thrive - but still

They yearn - they wonder, will they ever become whole

One day, they pray - their inner planets will align

When the pursuit of ancestry will uncover their origin.

They lean into the haunting absence with a quiet resilience...

children who live without the stories of their lost family tree.

We all know some of those kind parent trees, they grow patiently

their roots hidden deep in nourished soil, their branches waiting,

anticipating the children who never knew a parent's love.

Trees whispering in the wind, telling stories of new ancestors,

the children hear silence speak anew- lullabies with kind words.

Leaves trembling with longing, buds pressed against the bark,

yearning to open, they gather and scatter blossoms of hope.

Hands came to trace the tree's rings, now voices called them kin.

these children no longer wander - lost, their laughter bright,

For tethered in the earth below. ..There, other kind trees waited -

Loving hands who named them found - tended their root and branch

Sentinels fiercely guarding what was never truly lost,

Sap carrying the pulse of remembered innocence

branches aching to cradle and forever be the root and branch

to those who did not know, did not believe that they belonged.

And now new blooms hover in hope, new roots appear -

seen at last - the tree was always there - keeping its vigil,

believing that someday,

a child might pause,

press ear to trunk,

and hear the heartbeat of a family

that had always been there...

Waiting to be found.

Elegiac no more - but continuing...growing. Happy!

We hold the hope that children remain safe in an unsafe world.