Poetry
Autism
My World Is My Own My world is my own. It's hard for you to reach me here. But the door That shuts you out, And shuts me in, May open Just a little, If we both try, You, From your side, Me From mine. --F.R.C. Down Syndrome
Different My eyes are different from yours, My speech is different too, One tiny bit of me makes me different, That's all. My heart beats the same as yours, My dreams are just as bright. There's just one little bit of me That makes me different, But most of me is you. --F.R.C. General DisabilitySmiling Eyes
You have no words to speak, But your eyes say everything A parent could wish to hear. Your smiling eyes, Your trusting gaze, Speak words enough, Secret, loving Words, No one can hear, But me. --F.R.C. |
Cerebral Palsy
This Body Cannot Hold Me I am this body, But it’s not all of me. My spirit soars, Though my body’s trapped, Limbs twisted, in this chair. Do not turn your eyes away, then, Because it makes you sad. Look deeper when you look at me, Look deeper to see the deeper me, The me this body cannot hold, The me that makes a flying chariot of this chair, To leave the Earth behind, And race among the stars. --F.R.C. In Memoriam
For those children who have gone before us. Do not say that these, our daughters, our sons, are forever lost to us in death. They live in us, in us, in every waking thought and every happy dream. They live immortal in mortal memory, deathless in love's recall. Do not say, then, that they are lost but know that they are found: enfolded forever in our hearts and God's embracing care. --F.R.C. Little Susan I took your tiny hand in mine as you lay dying. It was not a sad good bye, Just a calm parting between friends. You were called Little Susan, But there was nothing little about you, Nothing small at all. Yet you were just 60 pounds at your farewell, Everything unnecessary stripped away. Nothing left of you but love. --M.M. & F.R.C. To Love What Death Can Touch ‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be – to be, And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this, And a holy thing, a holy thing to love. For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me. To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.” --Rabbi Chaim Stern |
Caravaggio's Truth
Your still life hangs in honor On our clinic wall. We share your artist's vision: Reality as it truly is, No more, No less, The world as you beheld it, And dared to show it: A beatific Virgin, With soiled, peasant's feet, A perfect straw-coiled basket, With imperfect mottled fruit. And withered leaves How could we not take your art, then, as our own And hang it on our clinic wall? It is a vision we share And experience every day, Embodied in every patient- Reality In all its imperfection. Humanity In all its tragic grace. --F.R.C |
The Wounded God
"Who has time to pray?" The father of a profoundly disabled child confessed to me, Exhaustion in his voice. "What is the use of prayer anyway?" he demanded, angrily. "Who is even God to me? If He is our Father, Why is He the father of such suffering?" What answer could I make to such heartfelt questions? I was silent. What was there to say? But then they came to me, these whispered words: "The God of the disabled is Himself disabled, Broken, Pierced. This wounded God is The Lord of little things: A child's quiet day, A child's peaceful sleep. He is a God of fragile vital hopes, Who gives parents strength to stay love's course For just one more day, Each and every exhausting day. Such love is prayer enough, A hymn to the suffering God, Who knows and bears all parent's pain himself." He stared at me in silence, This father of a disabled child. Just stared, then smiled, And slowly walked away, --F.R.C. |
Our Physician
The healthy need no healing,
The well no physician's care.
Perfect health requires no prescription.
But perfection is of our imagining
As we thought the stars once were.
Not of our humble changing world.
His medicine is of this earth, no other world than here.
He is a physician not to the well,
But to those who never were,
And never will be well
As the world knows wellness.
Medicine is his ministry,
A ministry to those fragile innocents who
Live life's limitations
And bear its mortal scars.
For these he left the shining,
Sterile laboratory behind
For a world of healing grace,
To take each patient as his teacher,
To know each one unique,
And see perfection in each imperfect smiling face.
--F.R.C.