Ninety-one degrees even as the sun flickers low,
my son stands tall, epicenter of buzzing children,
unruly excited bees to his sweet nectar: soccer.
They have little, but every week grow rich in runs,
breathless goals, high-fives, and him; even
before he gets out of the car they call his name.
They flock eagerly around him, try their feet at it,
kick, try again. A boy falls in facedown sprawl,
cries in the grass. My son kneels at his side, but he
will not stand. My son speaks soft words I cannot
hear, and I see his hand, patting the shaking back.
Someone near me says autistic, the child is autistic,
as if tears can be shut up neat and put away there.
The boy sits up suddenly, sobs I fail I fail I fail. I
cannot think who of us does not. My son coaxes
the boy onto trembling feet. And here is the thing,
my son keeps his hand on the boy’s shoulder as
infinite moments tick by, and wherever he walks
on the field, the boy stays right next to him, under
his arm. The ball bumps, the kids zig and zag,
the sunset a gold whir of unexpected wings.
–
Laura Reece Hogan is the author of I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock, 2017), and O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems can be found in America, The Christian Century, The Cresset, The Windhover, the anthology In a Strange Land (Cascade Books, forthcoming 2019), and elsewhere.