For these poems I tried to emulate Rebecca Foust’s “A Mothers Understanding”. I enjoyed how through her poems she let us through her journey of being a mother to a child with Asperger’s syndrome. Foust’s connection to her son’s journey related to the relational model as it catered to the thoughts and feelings of a mother with a child that has a disability, with the focus on how it affects her personally. I thought that doing an assortment of poems catered to the feelings of a mother that had a child with quadriplegia, intellectual disabilities and confined to a wheelchair. I wanted the poems to reflect societal feelings, admiration, sadness, agony, pain, all in one. Putting a twist on the poems that Foust had done in “A Mother’s Understanding” by pairing the experiences to that of a black mother. It was important to me that the experiences of disability were not solely based on the traditional white American’s narrative of disability, but rather a rendition of disability that can be shown through the lens of intersexual, feminist, and a cultural viewpoint, essentially a black feminist disability narrative. I wanted the reader to grasp the understanding of how disability functions within different cultural expressions and the stereotypes that follow. Furthermore, how blackness is barred, in a western, ablest, patriarchal society from the weakness and visibility of disability.
word count (discussion): 226
word count (with poem explanations): 1191
I pledge my honor, Cayla Stroud.
