Red Letter Poem #201

 

 

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 #201

 

 

 

 

Lunette 12

 

 

When the womb closed, and a blade came down,

and the last evidence of ash

cloaked the rice-fields of the South Pacific,

I cried without a thought of who I cried for. 

I howled like a tunnel full of the wind

that turns its refuge to a feature of the land.

I must have known something I did not,

that the world, if you can call our first

a world, is hostile, and the tenderness

that follows binds a silence to the wound. 

The day I arrived, a nurse dabbed me

with a towel and handed my mother

the memory I lost.  So I would always begin

in the middle.  In the years to come,

I would open my eyes like a book

about a city before a sunrise touched it. 

It was not mine, and yet, I saw it.  I saw

the pinned sleeve of a soldier on a bus.

I wanted to ask, but when I looked up,

my mother told me, hush.  She who

was my memory, she told me with her eyes. 

 

 

             ––Bruce Bond

 

 

It will surprise no one if I say that love can be a blessing, a trauma, or a mixture of both.  For those fortunate ones, the effect of our parents’ profound caring reverberates throughout our lives, and provides us with a first model for how two distinct beings can work toward a feeling of wholeness.  For others in more difficult circumstances, a conditional or restrictive love––or its absence altogether–– has a transformational effect upon the developing sense of self which cannot be overstated.  Birth, of course, is a moment where those two forces collide––and some psychologists believe we’ll spend the totality of our lives coming to terms with that expulsion from one wholly-protected realm and into the harsh atmosphere of the external world.  In Lunettes, a brand-new collection from Bruce Bond, the poet is engaged in an extensive exploration of our experience of incompleteness, brokenness, estrangement: from the sanctum of the self, community, history, our place in the natural world. 

 

But the project was intensified when Bruce began to notice similar imagery in the photographs of noted photographer Walt Cochran-Bond, who just happens to be Bruce’s older brother.  The ‘lunette’ refers to a range of images, but mainly the half or crescent moon, in celestial or artistic settings, including those semicircular architectural details above doors in churches or grand buildings.  This mysterious sense of incompleteness, of the urgency for growth, figures in each poem and photograph, often in subtle ways.  So the brothers began to collaborate, sometimes simply pairing photographs and poems that felt a certain kinship; other times Bruce composed new poems in response to the art in a more typical ekphrastic experiment.  The ultimate project is a kind of dialog between poet and photographer, word and image––one that might, not necessarily complete, but enlarge the siblings’ purview, while helping their audience grapple with our own experience of fragmentation.  After all, that moon-shape cannot help but make us think of the mutability of the self––our anxiety at the prospect of diminishment, and our renewed desire for growth and wholeness.

 

Bruce is, without a doubt, the most prolific poet I know, with some three dozen titles on his résumé.  Lunette was the Editor’s Selection from the Green Jewel Prize competition, and was just published by Green Linden Press.  A Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas, Bruce is also an accomplished classical and jazz guitarist which, no doubt, affects the musicality I find throughout his writing.  In this book, we’re offered a series of 21-line poems with accompanying images––the photo paired with Lunette 12 being a view from inside a cave that’s been weathered into a mountain, its rough arches and ethereal lighting giving us the feeling of a natural temple.  And there is indeed a spiritual edge in Bruce’s poem––beginning with a reimagining of his birth into this wounded existence, and hinting at the deep connection with his mother that the severed umbilicus did not end.  It seems as if mother and child are each carrying portions of memory which the other cannot access.  Yet still, with just a look, the poet is instructed by his mother that some pains, some losses, require more than casual attention.  Like a poem or work of art, they demand that we open ourselves to the places deep within which are waiting still to be healed.

 

 

 

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

 

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