I crave determination, cherish stubbornness, and celebrate intent. It can find you room in a stable, convert a manger into a cradle, get you through childbirth among strangers. It drives you across oceans and deserts, where you are about as likely to drown or die from exposure as not when fleeing war and torture in your homeland. It makes you hide what little is left of detergent so the teens in your refugee camp on the Greek islands cannot use it to attempt suicide in their despair.

I have often thought of faith as a form of determination. Take Christianity, for example. If people under the most dire of circumstances sit on Christmas eve and relish a reading of Luke (1-2,) with eyes now shining from the promise in Bethlehem instead of from tears, there is determination to keep up hope. Really a sheer stubbornness to keep the belief alive that somehow, somewhere there will be justice, as implied by the birth of God’s child. Never mind the inconsistencies when that same Luke (18-16) calls for letting the little children come, unhindered, but good Christians in Germany and Europe in general refuse dry-eyed to allow the 4000 (!) minors to escape the limbus of the aegean circles of hell. I’m not even starting to talk about the cruel disgrace closer to home. (And I am not exempting other religions from hypocrisy either (just look at Palestine) – it was just an example.)

Should we stop writing about the darkness that is hovering, stop reading about the despair descending? In the public world or the private one(s) with their own forms of impending doom? No, we should NOT! We should be determined to walk upright and do the right thing and preserve our last bit of self-respect and self-determination – and then share it with others, help them to prevail as well. Faith demands it. As does a different moral compass for the faithless, structured by a different underlying tale. Let us all be stubbornly inclined towards justice, in solidarity!

Verities

By Grace Cavalieri

Maybe she had dementia,
the old lady in the woolen hat,
I don’t know, but she
stopped short in the middle of the aisle,
when her son shouted, PUT THAT BACK.
Clutching a small bag of chips –
like a newborn against her chest,
like a prayer,
like something she owned –
her face collapsed,
Please, but no sound came except,
PUT IT BACK! NOW! PUT IT BACK!
This was Christmas Eve, not that it matters;
Why even embellish a story like that.
I can only tell you I walked behind her
as she walked behind her son,
until I could no longer watch,
yet there was something about
her lopsided hat, her lowered head
that made me sure
no matter what happened next,
she would not put it back.

Grace Cavalieri is an American poet, playwright and radio host of “The Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress. In 2019, she was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland. She was awarded the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from WASH INDEP REVIEW. She received the George Garrett Award from AWP for Service to Literature, the Allen Ginsberg, Paterson Award, Bordighera and Columbia Poetry Awards, A Pen Fiction Award,  CPB’s Silver Medal.

Photographs from yesterday’s walk near the ICE facility with its detainee holding cells on Bancroft/Macadam Ave. If you look closely below, you can also see homeless encampments dangerously close to the river.

And here is the perfect music for Notte di Natale by Corelli, cormorant giving his blessings.