Reading about the Lost Children of Tuam

I knew the story would end unearthing

bones. One cannot marry an Irish man

without uncovering secrets.

Only once did his grandmother show me

the metal box of photographs as we sat

above the family store in Limerick.

She should have told me her youngest boys

never spoke. That one died (somehow) at four

while the other spent a decade in a playpen.

At twelve, he was carted off to Dublin—

left in a home run by Sisters of Charity.

When they thought he was too old

to sleep near girls, one of the nuns pushed him

to her quarters in a wheelbarrow each night

until he died of pneumonia. Even when

my daughter didn’t speak and I asked question

after question, his family said nothing.

After her diagnosis, only the aging aunt

whispered the truth, showing me

newspaper clippings from her brother’s asylum.

The dead boys’ photographs remain hidden

in the biscuit tin under the broken turntable.

I see their wide smiling faces, beautiful

as my daughter’s, as I sing nursery rhymes

in her pink room. Beautiful

as the abandoned children of Tuam,

awaiting their first communion.