Poem on a Holy Day: Reflection #3 on Perspective-Taking

So already, on Good Friday, a holiday of spiritual importance to many I know, and one month before Passover, a holiday of spiritual importance to me, I offer a poem about the news stories and photos that make other lives and experiences importantly real to us, if we let them in and hold them close for at least a while. 

Dangerous crossings into new states, literal or figurative, abound in history, literature, and religious traditions. They sit at the narrative cores of both Easter and Passover. If we take the stories of crossings to heart, we too may cross into a place of deeper understanding of others and ourselves. As to the question of how and how much our newly taken or transformed perspectives affect "the world," I'm still wrestling with that. At the very least, understanding and feeling for other people are starting points. They assert the preciousness of lives--and life. We grieve differently for lost lives that we've tried to imagine and understand; we deplore more sincerely the desperate situations that put such lives at risk.

Throwaways

“In the photos her mother posted on Facebook, . . . [Bella Bond] was, if anything, more beautiful than Baby Doe, the nameless digital approximation through which so many of us came, in death, to know her.”*

For weeks there was Baby Doe. 
And then, finally, Bella Bond. 
The details of her life and death
filled us with powerless grief and rage,
made us mourn other Baby Does,
the ones the tide found
before someone walking a familiar stretch of beach
noticed something that turned out to be someone. 

As trash day drew near, 
I couldn't toss out the newspaper.
"I can't bear for her to be thrown out again," I told my husband.
"Then keep her," my husband said. 

So I did.
I come upon her whenever I open my desk to pay bills.

Last week I saved another photo from the paper, 
this one of nameless migrants
crossing a cold, coursing river.
I feel almost overwhelmed as I imagine
the desperation fueling their risk;
they, in that moment, dare feel nothing 
but the slick muck under their feet,
the water around their thighs,
the children in their arms,
the rope in their chafed hands.

A blue-blanketed baby boy looks on,
curious but oblivious to the danger.
But the pink-jacketed girl to his left

might just sink under the weight

of terror and sadness.

I couldn’t let her vanish

with the turn of the page, the ring of the phone,

the next day’s news story.

So I save newspaper photographs—
a useless way to care, I know,
but my way of bearing witness, remembering,
keeping the ceremony of innocence above the rising water.

* Nestor Ramos and Evan Allen, “’Her Name Was Bella, The Boston Globe, September 19, 2016, p. 1.

   ** I am grateful for the literature, inspiration, and often even the exact words of Richard Wright ("The Man Who Lived Underground"), Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman), William Butler Yeats ("The Second Coming"), NL (Memories of the Heart), Nestor Ramos and Evan Allen (The Boston Globe), and the South Shore Scribes (my writing group).