Read with permission by Max Wallis
Editorial Note by Max
Angi Holden’s Son is a poem of tenderness complicated by the world’s gaze. What begins as an intimate moment - a grown son’s affectionate embrace, his “childlike grin and wave” - is quickly reframed by a stranger’s blunt intrusion: What’s the matter with him? The poem catches this collision between love and stigma, and in doing so, it slows time. Boats drift, butterflies settle, water cascades… the scene becomes almost unbearably heightened as the speaker absorbs the question.
The woman’s self-justification, “I’m a professional … Special needs,” exposes the casual cruelty of authority cloaked in expertise. Against this, the son’s kiss is radiant, “like a touch of sun,” anchoring the poem in love rather than diagnosis. The final line refuses neat definition, holding the tension between explanation and resistance, between spectrum and spectrum: light, colour, autism, and love.
Holden’s poem is both defence and celebration, insisting on the dignity of difference. It reminds us that poetry, like parenting, sometimes means holding the silence around what cannot — and should not — be reduced to a label.
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Angi Holden is a retired lecturer, whose poetry and prose explore differing perspectives of relationships and identity, within a broader context of memory. She has been writing most of her life, most recently at a desk so covered in leaves and feathers collected by her grandchildren that it resembles a nature table.
