The yellow mask I wear on buses and trains, because I do not trust the uproar,
And behind it, a master of tempests.
The childish trick I have of hiding important things.
In the woods I always stand alone
Like an orphan without mercy.
Because night has no name I spend the days in conjecture.
The summer wind knows about grief.
Gauss, the great mathematician, was a tremendous poet.
I went to see the New York Mets this past Sunday with my inlaws, Bill and Norma, and my wife Connie. Lifelong Mets fans all. Bill has been rooting for "the Amazins'" since their first season in 1962, back when they had players so inept that their manager, Casey Stengel remarked, famously, "Can't anyone here play this game?" If you're not a baseball fan you may not know that in 1962 the Mets lost 120 games, still the record for the worst season in history. They were lovable losers with players like Choo Choo Coleman and Marvelous Marv Throneberry.
The franchise was created to offset the fact that New York City lost two baseball teams to California–the Dodgers and the Giants.
Now the Mets are celebrating their fiftieth anniversary and they're fighting to be respectable with a cast of young players and some old fashioned grit. No matter what happens they won't lose 120 games.
Pictured above is the rotunda to Citi Field, which is essentially a museum honoring the memory of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player to be signed by the all-white major leagues. The entrance to Citi Field is stunning, both as a piece of architecture, but also as a civil rights memorial. I do not know of any other professional sporting team that honors civil rights in their stadium. Tell me if you know? Let's go Mets!
toolkit full of resources specifically designed for parents, educators and students dealing with bullying of children with special needs.
Let’s help spread the word, shall we?
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Professor Stephen Kuusisto, blind since birth, is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com
There is perhaps a moral law within us, but nothing like the wind out there
and I mean nothing. I stood in a shadow at sunrise
a darkness on my wrist joints, knuckles, open palms
the evening’s chill all around. There is not much
between a person and the wind. We walk with a song on our lips
and one sound overtakes another what with the breeze.
For a helpless moment I thought I was the world.
“Poetry is an artful plagiarism sometimes, where odd combinations of words influence our language and heightens our experience.” – Stephen Kuusisto
Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com
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July. The houses shrug into themselves
Getting ready. Light and haze in the morning.
The roads are pure and simple.
I find a box of screws, something
From my father, now a factor of language.
He could not mend things, my father.
Along with coffee and the newspaper
I find Mahler on the radio.
Mahler who said: “I beat and pound for the dead.”
I have been trying to think of a way to express a thing both delicate and oddly idealistic. Maybe the sleeper in me would say there’s a dark star in my wrist. And what’s so idealistic about that? Oh I don’t know, something of the universal occurs inside our most fragile spots. There’s a little spark of immanence behind your left ear. I need something both to discover and love about the most customary things. Take a key and turn it in the lock of the green leaf and enter the old city of the trees.
So that’s my state today. I bent down on the lawn this morning and a gray winged grasshopper walked like a stately old man between the roots of the catalpa tree. I entered my house feeling a kind of vertiginous loneliness for which there is no solution. And that’s the way this day has been. And as the Swedish poet Lars Forssell would say: Tend it/guard it/The life-flame, the fire of hope.
“Poetry is an artful plagiarism sometimes, where odd combinations of words influence our language and heightens our experience.” – Stephen Kuusisto
Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com
Stop-and-go traffic: smoke rose from the hood of the car, pouring into the open windows every time the car moved forward a few feet, then gathering again under the hood when the car stood still. The occupants must have known the car was on fire—the passenger fanned herself with a magazine when the smoke overwhelmed, and the smoke was thickly white, impossible to ignore—but they drove on stoically, enveloped in smoke, intermittently shooing it out the window.
So American, I thought, to continue driving even as our vehicle burns, to pretend not to notice the smell of smoke and engine and burning oil. Maybe also, so human, to try to make the best of even the most terrible situation—or if the best can’t be made, to at least pretend like nothing is going wrong, whistling over the sputtering engine, fanning smoke from our face.
After my father died, a dear friend said of his bedroom, filled with breathing machine and tracheotomy cleaning equipment, rehabilitation devices, medication, “This looks like the room of someone who’s been sick for a long time.” And in the obituary, my step-mother chose the words, “after a long illness.” I was utterly surprised by both statements. I understood my father wasn’t as strong as he once was, I had made a plethora of hospital visits at all hours of the day and night, had driven the two hour stretch between Columbus and Cincinnati dozens of times because of new health crises. But I still didn’t truly understand my father as ill, as dying. Living with disability, yes, growing older, yes. Not dying. I fanned myself with a magazine when the smoke got into my eyes.
And that’s just one example—I’ve averted my attention as relationships clearly deteriorated, breathed great billows of smoke in ill-fitting work environments, refused to admit even to myself how badly I’ve felt physically. It can be healthy, of course, to carry on, to focus, not on the smoke, but on the sunny day, on the way the sun illuminates the smokiness. But there’s a limit, too—isn’t there?—on how much we should stay the course when it’s clear the course is actively combusting all around us. And I’ve also been on the other end, becoming consumed by things over which I have very little control, screaming bloody murder about the smoke all around us, ridiculously stressed over political elections, global warming, people I’ll never even meet.
So what I’m trying to figure out these days is how to live clearly attuned to the smoke—not in ignorance or avoidance—but also well, also happily. To acknowledge that the car is on fire, to actively work to put out the flames, but not to let that knowledge consume my every waking thought—and my every sleeping dream. To be fully aware—and to live the best life I can anyway.
Thank you to everyone who came to USICD’s 2012 Annual Meeting! We were thrilled to see such a great turnout out of members, community members and even some international visitors on Tuesday, June 12 at the U.S. Access Board’s conference center. 
Ellis travelled across East Africa in May and June to provide technical support and guidance for installations of USICD’s Global Disability Rights Library in the countries of Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. Below is the second of a series of reflections on his travels and work abroad. 
With the CRPD now being considered in the Senate, we have been spending June and July making sure that the disability community has accurate and thorough information on the disability treaty and the latest news on the ratification process. If you would like to become more involved, please contact our Disability Rights Program Manager 
In June 2012, the United Nations held a conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference, named Rio +20, was attended by heads of state, thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, and NGOs. Participants met to consider how to reduce poverty, advance social equity, and ensure environmental protection. Rio +20 marked the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also held in Rio de Janeiro. This year’s conference resulted in a 49-page outcome document entitled “The Future We Want” that calls for a wide range of actions that include launching a process to establish sustainable development goals and engaging civil society. This document includes five specific references to disability including participation and access to information, a commitment to an integrated approach to planning and building sustainable cities, and an emphasis on ensuring equal access to education for people with disabilities. 
Planet of the Blind 