An Excruciatingly Beautiful Poem

I am honored to have known Carole Anderson, a mother who lost one of her children to adoption, a past president of Concerned United Birthparents, and a visionary who called for adoption to be replaced with guardianship back in the 1990s.

She was a social worker and an attorney and a powerful spokesperson and writer, and one of my personal heroines and role models. I don't know if any other of her poems were published, but this one was in my first book, shedding light on...The Dark Side of Adoption (p 91).

PREREUNION PAIN

I am filled with hate:
a black, hot cancer of hate
I hide with a hearty grimace
I call a smile
while it consumes me.
I hate the evil agencies that say nature is nothing and mothers even less, 

that claim to create while they maim and destroy.
I hate those men of God
who use youthful faith as a sword
to sever hearts and souls,
who promise forgiveness
at the price of martyred lives.
I hate the grasping couples who pray to God to bless them by damning families He made, who self-righteously build greedy joy on the bodies of bleeding mothers.
I hate the foolish girl I was, who so despised
herself
she believed she was unworthy, whose choiceless trust in others' wisdom made her child a sold commodity. I am filled with hate for the agonies of adoption: its endless, aching injustice,
its everlasting spiritual torment,
and the festering of eternal emptiness.

—C.J. Anderson

Originally published as "Adoption Agony," Origins, March/April, 1983.