The Strangers by Patrick Hicks

The Strangers

by Patrick Hicks

After we picked you up at the Omaha airport,

we clamped you into a new car seat

and listened to you yowl

beneath the streetlights of Nebraska.

Our hotel suite was plump with toys,

ready, we hoped, to soothe you into America.

But for a solid hour you watched the door,

shrieking, Umma, the Korean word for mother.

Once or twice you glanced back at us

and, in this netherworld where a door home

had slammed shut forever, your terrified eyes

paced between the past and the future.

Umma, you screamed, Umma!

But your foster mother back in Seoul never appeared.

Your new mother and I lay on the bed,

cooing your birth name,

until, at last, you collapsed into our arms.

In time, even terror must yield to sleep.

It seemed appropriate that, after Sylvia Plath's poem about being a new mother that I posted last week, a different perspective would be interesting. In The Strangers, Patrick Hicks provides that very different perspective, but it has nothing to do with being a father.

Stanza 1 sets the scene, but it is in stanza 2 that our hearts begin to break. First, we feel for this young toddler/older baby (I am assuming a girl about 1 1/2) who is frightened and confused and missing the person she knew as comfort and safety. She does not understand what is happening.

The adoptive parents are also heartbreaking. They have a new child and are filled with love for this new family member, and she wants nothing to do with them. Even worse, they cannot explain to her what is going on. The toys they have bought are not helping, as the little girl just wants her umma. Plus, the crying and screaming is apparently nonstop, which must make them feel even more devastated.

Even when the child looks at the speaker and his wife, it is, we learn in stanza 3, with terror in her eyes.

The baby ends with the daughter, exhausted, not falling asleep but collapsing, finally, with her new parents on the bed. The poem's last line wraps up the poem--even terror gets tired and must sleep. The picture of the family unit is perfect, but the few hours beforehand were wrought. I imagine the new parents, also exhausted, fell asleep soon afterwards.

This poem was published in Patrick Hicks' book, Adoptable, published in 2014 by Salmon Poetry Ireland. You can hear and watch Hicks read this poem on PBS here. (You can also donate to PBS while you are there!)

The poet's website is here and it includes information about his poetry and his novels, as well as a few other poems.