Red Letter Poem #105

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.  To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

                                                                                                          – Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #105

 

 

 

I would like to believe that the signature statement of our age is this one: “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” – taken from Dr. King’s speech at the National Cathedral in 1968.  But I fear it will end up being this – spoken at a crisis meeting of high-ranking Soviet officials focused on what came to be known as the Holodomor famine in the 1930’s: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”  The speaker was, at the time, the Commissar of Munitions – but Joseph Stalin went on to become the supreme ruler of his nation, operating with that same heartless realpolitik, where power and control trumped all other concerns.  It’s a cruel irony that the famine being addressed – and dismissed – at that meeting was taking place in Ukraine, another nation whose people had been swallowed up by the Soviet empire.  It seems that, today, Vladimir Putin must be using Stalin’s statement as a political guide as he wages his remorseless war on the cities and towns of a neighboring country that refuses to bend to his will.

 

So I especially appreciate the reminder that poets provide – voices representing the ordinary and the marvelous within our shared existence: that enmeshed in the sweeping forces of history, ours is the living and dying at stake.  Ours, too, the dreams we inherited from our parents – whose transmission to our own children is both a sacred duty and our deepest hope.  And, of course, ours, this very conversation which despots have tried to control since the earliest human civilizations, hammering it down with darkness and brutality, but which somehow keeps managing to find some small path back into daylight.

 

Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko made her poetry debut at the age of 12 but, because her parents had been blacklisted during the Soviet purges of the 1970s, it took another dozen years and the advent of perestroika before her first book received publication. Since then, she has authored twenty works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, literary and social analysis which have been translated into a score of foreign languages.  Today’s Red Letter piece is taken from her Selected Poems, translated by Lisa Sapinkopf and published by Boston’s own Arrowsmith Press.  Oksana has been called “without doubt the most influential literary figure in Ukraine of the last half century”; one of her novels occupied a spot on her country’s best-seller list for a full decade.  Her honors – in her native land and beyond – include MacArthur and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as the Antonovych International Foundation Prize, the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine, and the Order of Princess Olha.  In early March, she addressed the European Parliament about the threats to Ukrainian sovereignty and the dire situation especially for the women there.  But for decades even before this crisis, her writing has borne witness to the myriad ways totalitarian regimes practice suppression in order to separate beleaguered people from their cultural inheritance and their imaginative freedom.  And now, away from her beloved home and friends in Kyiv, she is doing everything within her powers to support her country’s resistance to the Russian onslaught.  In a sense, she is testing something of an Archimedean principle: with the heart as the fulcrum and a lever of fervid language, is it possible to move the world? 

 

 

A Kingdom of Fallen Statues

 

 

Just as children scrawl self-portraits
With two figures, mom and dad,
Grasping them with unsteady stick-hands,
I’m drawing on the windowpane
A kingdom of fallen statues —
And the outlines, delicate, are quivering.
In the kingdom of fallen statues all gates hang open,
And even marauders no longer tread grass
That was overgrown in an instant.

Vanished temples,
And yes, vanished dramas —
But how real, O God, how alive they are...

Gilding and lapis flake like skin
From the leprous faces of princes and saints.
And, seated on tombstones or perhaps on column stumps,

Black-hooded gravediggers roll cigarettes in yellowed verse.

Don Quixote’s shield lies somewhere,
Somewhere Casanova’s cloak has been tossed,
Somewhere stands the tent where Khmelnytsky

Hosted Europe’s envoys.
In the kingdom of fallen statues you can hear a language

Of words still warm but learned no longer.

I’m drawing it all: everything that’s ever vanished, or will;
I peer into my picture as into rippling water:
Triumphant Nike’s head

Lies somewhere in the grass.

I’ll draw it — and then
I’ll end it with a period.

   – Oksana Zabuzhko

 

 

                                       (Translated by Lisa Sapinkopf and Oksana Zabuzhko)

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

* Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog

https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3106-redletter-021822.html

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner