Rethinking Persevere is a Word
Persevere is a long word:
four hundred years long,
the distance of the Middle Passage,
the length of a ship’s hold, packed with bodies chained together.
And although persevere
contains none of the letters that spell luck,
privilege shines through from beginning to end.
The privilege of tracing a blood line
for generation after unbroken generation
in an ancestral story of ascension
rather than a lineage that dead-ends
in the shackles of slavery,
in lives with trauma encoded in the DNA,
in the knowledge that one’s existence
is not predicated on bootstraps
or an innocuous insistence to try again
or the blithe assertion to summon grit
but instead dependent on ancestors who persevered
surviving horrors unimaginably severe
family members inhumanely severed from each other
per their owners’ whim.
Persevere is a light word for some,
a chirpy motivational poster word.
For others it is a heavy word,
a how-dare-you-assume word,
a claim-my-humanity,
praise-the-ancestors,
lift-while-we-climb* word.
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2021
*Angela Davis
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| view from the summit of Aldis Hill, St. Albans, VT |
What Are the Chances?
Twenty percent chance of rain hung low and purple
over the shoulders of mountains splashed with the last
of this year’s wash of autumn color.
On Aldis Hill, we took the Main Loop trail
hiking steadily up
through stands of white-bark birches
and flutter-of-orange maples
in a silence broken only
by a downy woodpecker’s hollow drumming.
At the summit, we stepped out from under trees
and twenty percent chance of rain had become a mosaic:
puffy white cumulus on a background of bright blue.
Across the valley, shafts of sunlight shone spotlights
on patches of red-orange-yellow trees.
Later, at Hathaway Point, we looked across Lake Champlain
and saw one hundred percent chance of rain headed our way:
one dark cloud with streaks of rain meeting the lake.
We could hear the rain on the lake
then in the trees
before we dashed for the porch at the ranger’s station.
When one hundred percent chance
was reduced to drips,
a honking V of geese
at least fifty strong
filled the sky
pointing
the way
south.
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2021
