Vigil For Hope
By Hayley Huge, Operations Director
Shared at the Vigil for Hope, organized by Cincinnati Resist, on June 13, 2025.
I want to start by sharing a poem called Making Peace by Denise Levertov
A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
We are here together because we believe that peace is possible if we create it.
American culture often teaches us that life is a contest—a zero-sum game where someone else has to lose in order for us to win. We’re told to be more successful than the person next to us and that there will always be someone at the bottom, so make sure it’s not you.
This deeply individualistic mindset, so entrenched in our society, makes it easier for politicians and oligarchs to divide us, to turn us against our neighbors.
It allows us to scapegoat the marginalized—the oppressed, those suffering under the same systems that affect us all—instead of questioning the systems themselves and those in power who benefit from them.
But despite this pressure to turn on one another, to fear each other, to cast aside those who seem different, we are here tonight together. We are building the relationships and community that will allow us all to thrive. We are leaning into our belief in each other, in our shared humanity, and in the understanding that our liberation and prosperity are not mutually exclusive and that in fact when we protect one of us, we protect all of us.
So we will not turn against immigrants, against women, against the children in Gaza, against people of color, against queer and trans people. We will not turn against the poor, the unhoused, the sick, or the disabled.
We are here tonight because we need each other, and because together, we have power. And we have the moral obligation to use that collective power to resist hate, fear, and violence, and to replace them with love, compassion, and solidarity.
We know that there are those—people and institutions—that want us to feel weak, to feel afraid, to believe we must depend on them and their weapons for safety. They want us to accept their tools of violence as the only way to maintain peace. But we are saying no.
In her book “From Conflict to Community” Gwendolyn Olton writes:
“One of the many tragedies of our modern existence under systems of oppression is that we have been robbed of our confidence that we can do anything without some authority. We’re frequently escalating things up to a parent, a boss, a cop, someone with the right diploma or certificate or title. It’s like we’re always waiting for the right person and the timing and circumstances. We think we’re never good enough and our fear of doing something imperfectly leaves us frozen in inaction.”
But tonight we are giving ourselves the mandate to create our own hope, our own peace. We are rejecting the idea that we need some outside authority to protect us from each other with guns and tanks and bombs.
We can create the peaceful world we know is possible if we are willing to live generously, if we are committed to being in relationship with one another, and if we dare to imagine and build the systems that will serve all of us—systems that we design for ourselves, not for the powerful few.
Systems that provide food for those who are hungry, systems that create accessible pathways to citizenship, systems of accountability that center healing rather than vengeance, systems that spread the resources and wealth amongst us. Systems that create abundance and share it freely rather than create scarcity and greed.
I want to end by saying how deeply grateful I am to all of you who are here tonight. I find hope in the relationships we are building, in the creative ways we’re imagining what our world can look like, and in the courage we have to challenge and expand our understanding of what we want and need as a society.