Quiet, quite rich longing wistfully waits within the souls and expressions of parents and children when autism masks the child’s true presence. Ignorance and assumptions lower both into silos where communication is replaced by mourning for the parents and loss of self esteem for the waiting, suffering child. These poems are about their experience, the parents’ massive loss, and the child’s great expectancy for love and endless capacity to hope.  I wrote the first poem to parents with the authority of a real autism expert titled, “The Lost Gift.”  An anonymous author wrote the second, titled “I felt an angel.”

The first poem guides parents to the opportunity of the awakening available when assumptions of what life should be like are transformed. Wonder is always a shade of insight away. Assumptions usually waste wellness wearily waiting for understanding.
The Lost Gift

Wanting personal communication
was lost in isolation
and will wait with suffering.
Each sadly wailing parent
only appreciates in silos of grief
longing for the child in another silo
longing for them,
separated waste assumes
as human thinking shapes all silos.

Your child waits in the same
wanting waiting presence where you wait,
with an equally deep scab wanting to heal.

All can assume wholeness and safe joy
when communication truly assumes
sacrificial appreciation
about your sad quiet place in life together.
Applying another approach
ignores the dignity of your relationship
as parent and child.
It makes him an object to fix.

A quite long assuming time
toasting and shattering all sincerity
in a pledge to be perfect performers
rather than loving parents.

What about our society makes parents like this?
He wants only to be seen
as a quite unique being waiting and longing;
you arrogantly ignore all that God gave,
taking assumption and patient aim
at crushing his uniqueness.

What awful thinking acts as a catalyst
to then assume all wonderful intelligence
is defined as, yes, your view of the world?

All of your other children
sat at your table
as intelligent.
Why not save this one
from the isolation
your thinking put him in?

Each autistic child deserves that.
And the autism
grows worse without it.
Actions may decrease
with controlling drugs,
but healing does not begin.

Say you will think differently,
and then read
what an awesome human being
longs for you
as no one else on the planet
ever has or will.

Assume his intelligence is active,
and your world will change.
Amen. Amen.

John Smyth

Patience in darkness is hard. We are stuck in a cold and scary place, imprisoned by autism and experts, consigned to life as a fool. What God does as we wait is send us angels. Inspiration is a wonderful thing as drugs and illness distort our presence even more.

I felt an angel

I felt an angel near today, though one I could not see
I felt an angel oh so close, sent to comfort me
I felt an angel’s kiss, soft upon my cheek
And oh, without a single word of caring did it speak
I felt an angel’s loving touch, soft upon my heart
And with that touch, I felt the pain and hurt within depart
I felt an angel’s tepid tears, fall softly next to mine
And knew that as those tears did dry a new day would be mine
I felt an angel’s silken wings enfold me with pure love
And felt a strength within me grow, a strength sent from above
I felt an angel oh so close, though one I could not see
I felt an angel near today, sent to comfort me.

Anonymous

As one waits in the isolation, it is also angels who arrest the hopelessness when all knowledge of felt waiting is ignored. Where they come from and where they go I do not know, but they are inspirations who give hope as we wait to be discovered.

Taking our waiting with each other in love together, resting real hope rallies the child until the parent wakes from a stubborn sleep imposed by society that he is not there, ready to engage and be loved. With all of our technology, for whatever tainted reason, we do not measure this nor try to close the neurological gap. What waiting gives until deliverance is hope. When the long wait is over, love blossoms and faith and hope renew in its presence.

John Smyth copyright 2013