52/365 A B C

A is for APPLE.
B is for BALL.
C is for CAT.

Now say, "APPLE"... "APPLE"

The oral method of Deaf education
Forced mimicry of sounds
To which students have no access
It wasn't always this way.

Deaf children once learned at Deaf schools
Taught by skillful teachers,
Many Deaf themselves,
Who modeled two languages and success
They signed without accents.

By those who can't agree on what ain't broke
No good thing is ever left un-fixed.

A tide of eugenics and good intentions
Carried in with it the notion
That these children are broken
And that clear articulation of sounds
Was somehow preferable to actual two-way communication and comprehension.

Children,
Now forced to sit on their hands in class,
Knuckles smacked with rulers,
For daring to speak the only language they owned
In the very school that had given their fingers voice.
Clenched fists, by day,
Hid the glow of coals still hot,
Saved them for the dark of night
Spun them into crackling poems,
Bonfire stories of true A's, B's, C's
Where A is for MYSELF and  REFUSAL
B is for PREVENT, for HANDS
And C is COMMUNICATION and CONCEPT
D, E, F, all the way to the Z of a LIGHTNING strike.

Were it not for these after-hours children
Sneaking language in their dorm rooms
Inventing new forms of poetry in a dialect
Born after the nation for which it was named.
Their budding language would have died with their parents long before its time.
A century later, American Sign Language is alive and well.
The old schools lie vacant,
Victims of modern medicine
And their own folly.
In public school classrooms,
The Deaf kid sits in the front row
A tiny computer wedged into his ear canal
Or implanted surgically into the mastoid bone in his skull
While the teacher TALKS LIKE THIS
Into the lapel microphone with dead batteries
They never bother to check.
He is the only Deaf child in his town
Somebody's mom
Who took a semester of sign class once at community college
Flails her arms uselessly at the front of his classroom
Calls herself an interpreter
And nobody knows the difference but the kid,
Who spends years learning mispronounced signs
Crammed awkwardly into English grammatical constructs
That make no sense to the eyes.

This is the child left behind.
Who will one day realize what was kept from him.
A linguistic community.
A true first language.
He is now too old to learn any language as a native
But if he still could, he would choose the one
In which APPLE doesn't start with an A.  It's an X!
BALL is the letter C!
and CAT isn't even a letter, it's an 8!

At the meetings,
They despair over his test scores,
Behavior problems,
Why is he always so angry?
Doesn't make friends.
They praise the interpreter lady,
Tell her she signs so beautifully.
The interpreter lady thinks she is signing "THANK YOU"
She signs it the way the child always does.

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