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Barbara Crooker ____________________________________________________________________
1 My oldest daughter, in raw silk, ivory roses, was married on a late June afternoon, when the grass was green as a field in Ireland, and every leaf on every tree applauded. 3 My son, after years and years of the alphabet soup of IEPs, the DSMs, WISC, ESY, a stack of files tall as a hay bale, will graduate next year, earn a high school diploma, something none of us ever imagined. 4 My husband has taken retirement, gave back his laptop, cell phone, Amex, left the car pool behind, and is now planting fruit trees: cherries, pears, peaches, lingering after breakfast with coffee on the deck, the roses blooming, the strawberries ripening; doesn't seem to need antacids any more. 5 And I'm still here, writing it down, letting the poems come, or not, as they will. My garden has never been better. ____________________________________________________________________
Barbara Crooker has published in magazines such as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, and The Denver Quarterly, anthologies,
including Worlds in their Words: An Anthology of Contemporary American Women Writers, and eleven chapbooks.
She has won the Word Press First Book award for her first full-length book, Radiance, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature,
seventeen Pushcart Prize nominations, and the WB Yeats Society of NY Poetry Prize. She is the mother of a 21 year old son with autism. ____________________________________________________________________
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