Samuel Washington Allen Prize Finalist, selected by Jennifer Garfield
Mary Christine Delea is the author of The Skeleton Holding Up the Sky, three chapbooks, and numerous journal publications. She is currently at work on a number of poetry manuscripts. Her website is mchristinedelea.com, and it includes a blog where she posts poems she loves with a short commentary twice a week. She also writes a Substack called Peeled Citrus Prompts. She is a former college professor, social worker, Poet-in-the-Schools, and retail manager. Delea now spends her time volunteering for various nonprofits and leading poetry workshops in-person and online. She also makes beaded jewelry, headdresses, and quilts.
Why I Chose Bernadette
I chose Bernadette because I saw Jennifer Jones
in The Song of Bernadette on TV.
Who would not fall in love/who could resist
such a beautiful actress/a story
filmed in 1945 about events that took place in France
a few years before the American Civil War?
Bernadette was the daughter of a miller
with visions at a grotto/at fourteen/
of a lady in a bright/white/light
whose visions birthed an industry
of hotels/religious tchotchkes/
causing so many little Catholic girls/me
to decide that Bernadette was more than
a great/dance-able Four Tops song
and would make a Confirmation name
any parent/my parents would approve of.
As adults/lapsed Catholics
we rarely use/mention our saints’ names
except occasionally/as if by rote
we blurt out the whole mess
when asked for our full names.
Mary Christine Bernadette Delea I say,
which translates into
a bitter Christian brave bear from the meadow
none of which has anything
to do with me,
a depressed agnostic woman from a suburb
who is sometimes brave
but more often fearful.
Bernadette is the patron saint of the ill, the poor,
people ridiculed and bullied for their piety/
religious beliefs/
and shepherds/shepherdesses. I’ve been ill
and I’ve been poor and I like sheep a lot,
but not so much as to tend them.
Jennifer Jones won an Oscar
for playing a teen-aged girl who sees
the Virgin Mary and saves her family/town,
who died at 35 after getting
tuberculosis in her right knee/
which is where my arthritis is the worst
and for which I now have
a revised knee replacement
which means I have a replacement of
a replacement. Jones died
of old age at 90, from what is referred to
as natural causes, which just means her body
slowed down to a stop.
Her last movie was The Towering Inferno,
which I saw in a theater when it came out
with my friend Phoebe
in a suburban town next to our own suburb.
Phoebe and I spent many Sunday afternoons
going to the movies, but this one
stands out from the mass
of disaster movies popular at that time
for its amazing cast
and special effects, but mostly for the scene
in which O.J. Simpson/
yes/that O.J. Simpson
goes back into a burning apartment
to save a cat. We in the theater
all started chanting
as if we had practiced beforehand/
as if we all knew each other
Go O.J.! Go O.J.!
over and over as he made his way
safely down the fiery tower with the cat.
I wasn’t then, but I would become
a cat person/we don’t now, but back then
we thought O.J. was a hero.
Did movie audiences in 1945/relieved
by the end of WWII chant
Jen-nif-fer! Jen-nif-fer!
over and over as her Bernadette character
saw the Virgin Mary outside of Lourdes?
I wasn’t there/sitting with them
in the dark/but I can say with confidence, no/
no, they did not.
It was a different time/generation.
The musical stars star athletes of my youth
were just babies/toddlers/not even yet
playing football/writing lyrics
to songs Jennifer Jones could have sung to/at home,
singing lyrics like
Mother Mary come to me
which is not from the Four Tops song/
but a Beatles song/and it contains
another part of my name/as does
a KISS song/which makes my name
weirdly musical/much like
The Song of Bernadette/which was not
a musical at all but is
a great musical/misleading title.
That movie influenced a part of my youth/was the reason
I chose Bernadette
for my saint’s name, but I must confess
that if Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecelia”
had been released just a year earlier/
a song that is/I think/about a prostitute
and not a saint,
this poem would instead be titled
Why I Chose Cecelia.