(While I don’t often explain my poems, I thought I’d explain this one. April is Autism Acceptance Month and a young man who is otherwise non-verbal read a poem for the Presbyterian service, using an alphabet sheet which deciphered his words one by one. Far from being a vacant body, we met a poet’s soul, and it shocked some of us out of the vaguely pleasant responses we give the different and disabled. It reminded me of my brother turning eleven and deciding he wanted to read the scripture for church service. Our entire family – big old sops that we are – cried.)
We cried when they told us.
He wouldn’t ever do anything, the voices told us, kind but authoritative. They knew, and we did knot know, a child’s limitations. He would never read, never cipher, never go to college, never go any further than the colorful third grade classroom where his IEP team sat. Nobody’s fault, nothing more to do – he was such a sweet boy, so well-behaved, a credit to his family, and we should be proud of that. We cried, but there was not much time for tears, as we had work to do – lunches to pack, shoes to tie, and a small boy to send to school anyway, where against all odds he learned what a joke was, and made them up, wrote lines of shaky letters that formed shaky words and sturdier sentences. Where, against all advice, he reached higher than his grasp, and leapt – and we, eyes on the sky, set to work regluing the feathers to his handmade wings as he leapt from higher and higher perches, crashed through wobbly landings, and taught us that persistence was the difference between failing and flying.
close focused, frowning
jeans creased sharp enough to slice,
minding his diction,
warming like slow winter sun
In the beginning, the Word
