A poem I found I wish to post

let me explain a bit first!!

Lately I have been heavily involved and getting interested in different disability Sports!!! well within that circle of friends is apparently a creative person involved in what is known as handcycling and he passed away today.. A great loss for those within handcycling sport So I went searching today for disability related poems and here is one I would like to share in honor of today's loss



Barbara Crooker
SIMILE

My autistic son showed me his paper
from remedial English; he was supposed
to fill in the blanks: Cool as a _________.
Smooth as a ________. Neat as a _____.

He came up with: angry as a teakettle,
and when I asked, "Why? "said, "Because
it was boiling mad." Of course,
it was marked wrong, one more red mark
in his life's long test.

When I called from Virginia to ask him
what he did last weekend,
he said, "We bought Italian salad dressing."

Last fall, we went to a Broadway play;
what he liked the most
were traffic lights and Don't Walk signs.

Oh, my little pork chop, my sweet potato, my tender tot.
You have made me pay attention to the world's smallest
minutia. My pea-shaped heart, red as a stop sign,
swells, fills with the helium of tenderness, thinks it might burst.

*Previously published in Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review and in Line Dance (2008)

Barbara Crooker is the author of three books of poetry, Radiance, which won the Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, Line Dance, which won the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, and More (C&R Press, 2010) She is the recipient of three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2004 WB Yeats Society Prize, and the 2006 Rosebud Ekphrastic Poetry Award.