Mother in a Refugee Camp

(Mother and Child by Henry Moore, 1898-1996,
English sculptor and artist)

In 1967, the south-eastern part of Nigeria tried to break away from the federal government to form the Republic of Biafra. In the brutal civil war that followed, the Nigerian government imposed a blockade around Biafra, and many hundreds of thousands of civilians died of starvation and disease. The secession ended three years later, in 1970, when Nigeria retook control over the rebel area.

Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian poet and novelist, wrote this poem during the hostilities.

MOTHER IN A REFUGEE CAMP

No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son
She soon would have to forget. . . .
The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs
And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps
Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one:
She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,
And in her eyes the memory
Of a mother’s pride. . . . She had bathed him
And rubbed him down with bare palms.
She took from their bundle of possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-colored hair left on his skull
And then — humming in her eyes — began carefully to part it.
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
Before his breakfast and school; now she did it
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

~ Chinua Achebe, born 1930, Nigerian poet, novelist, and critic

The Holy Child’s Song

A favorite subject for artists has been the image of Mother and Child, with painters and sculptors creating countless variations on this theme.

One particular version, the Madonna and Child, depicting the young Mary and her child Jesus, is the most popular religious image in Christianity, surpassing even the Nativity and the Crucifixion.

The works of art below suggest the variety of artistic approaches to this subject across the centuries.




(Madonna and Child, two of at least thirty such paintings
by Raffaello Sanzio, known as Raphael, 1483-1520; with
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, one of the three
shining stars of the High Renaissance)


(Icon of the Enthroned Virgin, sixth century,
located at the Saint Catherine Monastery, Sinai,
Egypt)


(Madonna and Child, Western African
wood figure, nineteenth century, in the
collection of the Museum of Ethnology,
Hamburg, Germany)


(Virgin and Child by Henri Matisse, 1869-1954, French
sculptor, printmaker, and painter)


(Madonna and Child by Henry Moore,
1896-1986, one of half a dozen such
sculptures by the English sculptor and
artist; he also created several sculptures
of the image of Mother and Child)


(Madonna with a Flower by Leonardo
da Vinci, 1452-1519, Italian artist of the
High Renaissance; this most tender and
loving of images is my very favorite)

from THE HOLY CHILD’S SONG

“And when My Mother, pretty as a church,
Takes Me upon her lap, I laugh with love,
Loving to live in her flesh, which is My house and full of light!
(Because the sky My Spirit enters in at all the windows)
O, then what songs and what incarnate joys
Dance in the brightest rays of My childish voice!

“In winter when the birds put down their flutes
And winds plays sharper than a fife upon the icy rain,
I sit in this crib,
And laugh like fire, and clap My golden hands:
To view my friends the timid beast —
Their great brown flanks, muzzles and milky breath!”

~ Thomas Merton (1915-1968), American Trappist monk, poet, and author of many essays and books

Saint Nicholas

(Early twentieth-century Dutch card
of Saint Nicholas)

December 6 is the feast day of Saint Nicholas, the kindly bishop of Myra (270-346), in what is now Turkey, who secretly distributed gifts to the poor.

European children, especially in Germany and Holland, leave their shoes out the night before, to find them in the morning filled with chocolates and other sweets as rewards for their good behavior during the preceding year.

Saint Nicholas is also known by other names, including Father Christmas, Grandfather Frost and, of course, Santa Claus.

SAINT NICHOLAS,

might I, if you can find it, be given
a chameleon with tail
that curls like a watch spring; and vertical
on the body — including the face — pale
tiger-stripes, about seven;
(the melanin in the skin
having been shaded from the sun by thin
bars; the spinal dome
beaded along the ridge
if it were platinum)?

If you can find no striped chameleon,
might I have a dress or suit —
I guess you have heard of it — of quiviut¹?
and to wear with it, a taslon shirt, the drip-dry fruit
of research second to none;
sewn, I hope, by Excello;
as for buttons to keep down the collar-points, no.
The shirt could be white —
and be “worn before six,”
either in daylight or at night.

But don’t give me, if I can’t have the dress,
a trip to Greenland, or grim
trip to the moon. The moon should come here. Let him
make the trip down, spread on my dark floor some dim
marvel, and if a success
that I stoop to pick up and wear,
I could ask nothing more. A thing yet more rare,
though, and different,
would be this: Hans von Marées’²
St. Hubert³, kneeling with head bent,

erect — in velvet and tense with restraint —
hand hanging down: the horse, free.
Not the original, of course. Give me
a postcard of the scene — huntsman and divinity —
hunt-mad Hubert startled into a saint
by a stag with a Figure entwined.
But why tell you what you must have divined?
Saint Nicholas, O Santa Claus,
would it not be the most
prized gift that ever was?

~ Marianne Moore (1887-1972), American poet

¹ quivuit – (kiv-ee-ute) the down of a musk ox, spun into yarn
² Hans von Marées – German painter (1837-1887)
³ St. Hubert – (655?-727), patron saint of hunters, often depicted standing by his horse in the forest and gazing at a stag; according to legend, as a young man he neglected his duties in favor of the chase until, while out hunting one day, he was converted from his wild ways by the sight of a crucifix between a stag’s antlers

In My Time

(Draped Reclining Mother and Baby by Henry Moore,
1898-1986, English sculptor and artist)

“Hope, like love,” wrote the German philosopher Josef Pieper, “is one of the very simple, primordial dispositions of the living person. In hope, man reaches ‘with restless heart’ [in the words of Augustine], with confidence and patient expectation, toward the bonum arduum futurum, toward the arduous ‘not yet’ of fulfillment, whether natural or supernatural.”

IN MY TIME

It’s easy to praise things present — the belligerent
stance of the woodhouse toad, the total
self-absorption of the frostweed blossom.
It’s simple to compliment a familiar mess
of curly dock, the serene organization
of common onion reeds, the radish bulb
and its slender purple tail. And I like the way
the jay flings dirt furiously this morning
from the window box, the ridiculous shakings
of his black beak.

But it’s not easy to praise things yet-to-come —
the nonexistent nubs of mountains not risen
from beneath the floor of the sea
or a new sound from some new creature,
descended maybe from our golden peepers
and white-chinned chuggers, that sound
becoming synonymous, for someone else,
with spring.

How can I appreciate light from an aging
sun shining through new configurations neither pine
nor ash? How can I extol the nurturing
fragrances from the spires, the spicules
of a landscape not yet formed or seeded?

I can praise these flowers today — the white yucca
with its simmering powder-covered moth, the desert
tahoka daisy and the buffalo gourd — but never
the future strangeness that may eventually
take their places.

From here now, I simply praise in advance
the one who will be there then,
so moved, as I, to do the praising.

~ Pattiann Rogers, born 1940, American poet

The Sound of the Sea

(Approaching Thunderstorm near Bristol, Narragansett
Bay, R.I., 1859 by Martin Johnson Heade, 1819-1904,
American painter)

“Until I saw the sea / I did not know / a sea breathes in and out / upon a shore,” wrote the poet Lillian Moore (1909-2004).

THE SOUND OF THE SEA

The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul:
And inspirations that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
Of things beyond our reason or control.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet