Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: Red Letter 224

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

The 1st Letter to the Corinthians

Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast;
love fears with a primal fear,
but walks on;
love could have surrendered, abandoned

everything,
but it walks on.
And sometimes love gets shot in the legs,
or shell fragments get stuck in them,
or its legs get blown off.
Then love is carried by its friends.

Love digs trenches and lives in them,
gnawing on ice from a hacked-up plastic bottle,
when it suffers thirst at minus twenty.
Love goes out on combat duty,
enters firing positions
with hernias, fever, prostatitis,
with blast concussions, asthma and allergies,
with a high probability
of not making it back,
thinking all the while about
the one most important to them.
Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things!

Love distinguishes the sounds
of a Grad rocket launching, mines exploding and

tanks advancing.
Love's eyes ache
when it stares through a thermal imager too long.
Love wakes up at night
when mice in the dugout
crawl under its coat.
Sometimes love
vomits at length in the woodland after a heavy

fight.
And sometimes love closes its friends' eyes,
wraps them in sleeping bags
and carries them away.

Love never fails.
But where there are prophecies, they will cease;
where there are tongues, they will be stilled;
where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
Because sometimes when the shelling ceases,
friends close love's eyes,
wrap it in sleeping bags
and carry it away.

And then it passes on
to the living.

—Artur Dron’

* * *

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

—George Orwell; 1984

“You’ve [Zelenskyy] been there for three years. You should have ended it. ... You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

—President Donald Trump

We were warned. There is no way of escaping that fact. There have been a wealth of excellent books in recent years—How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky; and Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum come to mind—fully illuminating the wannabe-dictator’s playbook. Each one details how authoritarian leaders use lies, threats of violence, and a host of quiet coercions to eventually take complete control of a populace. But even if you’re the sort that never ventures into the ‘political science’ aisle of the bookshop, a classic novel like George Orwell’s 1984 has become part of the intellectual fabric of our culture since its publication 75 years ago—if nothing else, through its famous quotes and movie adaptations. Orwell demonstrates, with terrifying accuracy, one central strategy: to convince ordinary people to accept the violation of our shared perception of reality, the connection between language and actuality. History, current affairs, can be rewritten at any moment simply because Big Brother says so. One of Orwell’s quieter lines continues to haunt my thoughts: “It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” And perhaps that’s the very reason we turn to the words of poets in times of great distress: because we trust the authenticity of their voices, their commitment to the truth of their experience—as best it can be witnessed, imagined, inscribed in the heart. And so I am deeply honored to have been given permission to share two poems from a new collection written by a young Ukrainian poet-turned-soldier, published during his recuperation from serious injuries received battling for his nation’s survival. His are words that cannot be easily repressed nor crushed beneath tank treads or hammering artillery.

In 2022, Artur Dron’ was a twenty-one-year-old journalism major and event organizer for a publishing house; but he quickly joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces after the Russian invasion. Today, at age 24, he is already a celebrated poet, on and off the battlefield; he’s been translated into several languages including these evocative just-published English versions from the acclaimed Ukrainian poet Yuliya Musakovska. They are taken from his 2023 collection, We Were Here (Jantar Publishing) and, I’m happy to report, the book will become available in the US in the coming months. The title echoes the defiant declaration of President Zelenskyy at the war’s outset, when he refused to go into exile for his own safety. For a time, though, Artur turned away from the pen, unable to justify art-making in the face of the brutality and destruction the Russian troops unleashed on his people. But, after a while, poetry reasserted itself into his life because it brought with it one undeniable attribute: it could make us “feel less lonely.” He’s said of these poems that they “were written at the front, but they are not about the war. They are about people who love more than they fear.”

By constructing this, the book’s final poem, on the Epistle of Paul, Artur is already asserting that some language will endure every attempt at obliteration. It’s the accumulation of carefully-observed detail (his distinction between the sound of different munitions; or the description of staving off thirst by “gnawing on ice from a hacked-up plastic bottle”) that insists we approach this moment from his perspective, and not through the filter of our safe remove. His personification of Love is hunkered down with him in the muddy trench; and after conveying the bodies of its comrades away from the fighting, Love itself becomes a casualty which we, the living, must care for and honor. Today’s Red Letter is appearing just days after the third anniversary of Putin’s unprovoked assault. (I’ll issue the second of Artur’s poems in a later installment.) It prompts me to remember that, when the Russian tanks were first amassed on Ukrainian borders, all the expert analysis was that Kyiv would fall within weeks. No one predicted how astonishingly resilient a people could be when they’re fighting—not for ideology, political aims, or bloodlust (as were the Russian conscripts,) but for their own families, homes, and deep-held beliefs. That same driving force empowers the words of this young poet, makes them feel utterly necessary. Under the regime depicted in Orwell’s classic, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” Artur—along with scores of other poets and artists, not to mention millions of Ukrainian citizens—are adamantly refusing to accept the constraints of such terrifying borders. Perhaps it’s a lesson we, in America, will be compelled to relearn.

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 BlueSky @stevenratiner.bsky.social
and on X (formerly Twitter) @StevenRatiner

Website and Red Letters archives coming soon!