For Michael, handicaps are challenges love can conquer. From the pen of silence comes a thundering sound. It shakes our traditional concepts and turns our expectations into whirlwinds. It all started with an A word, the kind of word mothers and fathers dread to hear. The word is autism, that mercurial, slippery designation stamped on the hearts and souls of the innocent because for some unknown reason, their internal wiring has gone awry.
Autistic souls are mute, distant, reveling in solitary romps through time.
They have their own world, curtained, sterile and stark. They never leave it. We dare not enter. Yet we claim to know it as deserted, dark, barren and at times ominous. Not so fast. says poet Michael O Reilly.