Prairie Dogs by DJ Savarese
Prairie dogs live in burrows,
Race out of their holes.
A lot of people like to catch them
In cages,
Rolling the little ones in paint,
Identifying them in the wild.
Everybody is trying to catch one.
Dogs fight in spring time.
Other females in need of meat
Get their babies from others’ nests.
Some get eaten.
This poem by DJ Savarese has been on my mind since I read it in the forthcoming (April 2007) book Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption by Ralph Savarese and by DJ, who wrote the last chapter, “It’s My Story.” Savarese includes “Prairie Dogs”—which DJ wrote when he was in the fifth grade for a school assignment—at the end of his introduction.
“What’s the poem about?” I asked gingerly after he was through. “its personal,” DJ replied. Only when I pushed him did he type, “about fotercare.” And, of course, being about foster care, it’s also about disability, for it was DJ’s autism—or, rather, the reigning view of this “disorder”–that allowed his birthfather to imagine it was perfectly acceptable to take his sister but not him when the State removed the two kids from the custody of their mother. As you read the poem and consider the brutal economy of the final line (the phrasing throughout is entirely DJ’s), tell me that this Autist doesn’t have a theory of mind or an impressive analogical flare or a keen understanding of contemporary social relations.
Savarese notes that, unlike his classmates who drew on “innocuous details” in their poems, DJ focused on the capture of the prairie dogs live in traps and also their “grim habit” of eating each other’s young: “All of that trapping and tracking seems a bit too much like the activities of the child welfare system,” Savarese notes And what happened to DJ in that system, and in foster care, is a grim story that Savarese narrates with passion and with compassion.
And that DJ tells, too: DJ, who is non-verbal and types on a keyboard, can represent himself and not only via by “telling what happens.” DJ also writes about other beings, other lives, like those prairie dogs. Some of whom “get eaten.”
DJ’s got words and so much to tell.
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POSTED IN: Animals, Autism Lit, Books, Language, Poetry
5 opinions for Prairie Dogs by DJ Savarese
dr.David
Oct 14, 2006 at 6:07 pm
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kevin_1000
Oct 14, 2006 at 7:53 pm
Poems are a great way to release/convey emotions indirectly. They tend to have a double meaning or can only be deciphered by the poet. They are like markers in time cataloging events and emotions.
Keep writing DJ.
The following poem captured my feelings when I discovered my son was autistic at 2 years of age and didn’t know the severity of the diagnosis. This was a while ago now. But still when I read it now, it takes me back to that time.
HOPE was but a timid friend;
She sat without the grated den,
Watching how my fate would tend,
Even as selfish-hearted men.
She was cruel in her fear;
Through the bars, one dreary day,
I looked out to see her there,
And she turned her face away !
Like a false guard, false watch keeping,
Still, in strife, she whispered peace;
She would sing while I was weeping;
If I listened, she would cease.
False she was, and unrelenting;
When my last joys strewed the ground,
Even Sorrow saw, repenting,
Those sad relics scattered round;
Hope, whose whisper would have given
Balm to all my frenzied pain,
Stretched her wings, and soared to heaven,
Went, and ne’er returned again !
-Emily Bronte
Kristina Chew, PhD
Oct 15, 2006 at 10:03 pm
There is another of Emily Brontë’s poems that has always touched something in me, and also this from the Japanese (I need to look up the exact reference):
Since my house burned down
I now have
a better view of the moon.
kevin_1000
Oct 16, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Now that’s what I call making the best of a disaster; and why not.
Another E. Bronte excerpt from “How beautiful the Earth is still”
“It is Hope’s spell that glorifies
Like youth to my maturer eyes
All Nature’s million mysteries–
The fearful and the fair–
“Hope soothes me in the griefs I know,
She lulls my pain for others’ woe
And makes me strong to undergo
What I am born to bear.
“Glad comforter, will I not brave
Unawed the darkness of the grave?
Nay, smile to hear Death’s billows rave,
My Guide, sustained by thee?
A little more positive than the first.
Autism Vox
Oct 22, 2006 at 10:26 am
[…] And not just because DJ writes poetry and wrote the last chapter of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption. And not just because, as Roy Richard Grinker writes in Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (forthcoming January 2007), his teenage daughter Isabel plays the cello and has a thorough knowledge of the animal world. And not just because my son Charlie is out biking on an hour-long early Sunday morning ride through the hilly streets of our town. […]
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