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 #268
Tomatoes
It’s when I hear how one out of every three
Of the first Cambodian grocers in downtown Lowell
Had somehow managed to flee the Khmer Rouge
I think two things: Satanic Boott Mills, where alley
By alley my mother’s father once failed to dodge
The splatter of rotten tomatoes; and volley by volley
Those shooters who somehow missed my village uncle
As he scampered up goat-paths, eluding the KKE.
Row by palpable, swollen-to-bursting row
It all comes back in those ripe domátes my cousins
And I would pack into narrow cardboard cartons.
In my father’s grocery store, I pictured giant
Blood blisters, flush with a little cellophane window.
And elders of legend, running the tribal gauntlet.
––George Kalogeris
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” A cogent if unsettling observation from novelist William Faulkner who knew something about the power of tribal memory. History and cultural inheritance is a central concern throughout the poetry of George Kalogeris––often delving into the world of ancestral Greece but, more specifically, exploring the mythos of his extended immigrant family that settled on the north shore of Massachusetts. And so it’s not surprising he felt an instant affinity when he learned that fully one-third of all the Cambodian grocers in the nearby city of Lowell emigrated to this country to flee the brutal regime of the Khymer Rouge. He’s heard this story before, in numerous incarnations. In the current political debate about immigration, that fact is too often minimized: the majority of people would never choose to leave their homelands if their very lives were not endangered. Some Americans may regard them as interlopers, come to ‘steal our jobs’; but, far more often, they’ve come to these shores to ensure that their children are not dragged down by political terror or abject poverty. And so the familial connections George teases out in today’s new poem extend beyond blood relations and include a broad range of people who are (as Liberty’s signature poem describes it) “yearning to breathe free.”
I was caught off-guard at first, seeing Boott Mills––a group of Lowell cotton mills founded in 1835––tagged with the appellation “Satanic” (William Blake’s “Jerusalem” suddenly echoing in the back of my mind). But it turns out it was not uncommon, during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, for people to consider this new mechanized production (coupled with the despoiling of our natural surroundings) as being an enterprise in the employ of Lucifer himself. The narratives in this poem are fragmentary, and so we are left to imagine what might provoke the local citizenry to pelt George’s grandfather with tomatoes––though we can easily deduce the message: these streets, these jobs, this freedom is ours, not yours. But quickly, the narrator’s mind skips back to the Greek Civil War, recalling stories of his uncle dodging bullets from Communist squads, high in the Peloponnese. It was yet another example of ideology tearing whole families apart, and bloodshed muddying the earth. And, just like that, the speaker jumps again and presents himself as a boy working in his father’s grocery store in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Clearly, the young poetic mind is already ripening––and as he packs the domátes, he’s able to perceive both sweet sustenance and deep-rooted suffering in what he holds in his hands.
An Emeritus Professor from Boston’s Suffolk University, George is a poet, scholar, and translator––recipient of the James Dickey Prize and the Meringoff Prize for Poetry. His last collection, Winthropos (Louisiana State University), is the inky embodiment of his historical and imaginative citizenship in both the Old and New Worlds. He is a craftsman of great skill and subtlety. Be honest: how many times did you have to read this little colloquial lyric before you realized it was a sonnet, replete with lovely off-rhymes and intricate patterning? But I must add one more detail to this biographical sketch: mere literary distinction does not reflect another, and quite essential quality of this individual and his life’s work: George is a deeply humane spirit who reaffirms the best aspects of our cultural legacy and the elements of its ancient Hellenic roots. And so a moment ago, laying down my pen, I found myself looking out the window at my wife’s garden where squash and green beans are flourishing, and her tomato vines are bent from the weight of the red ripening globes. It’s an image of plenitude which, sadly, is in stark contrast to the grim newspaper headlines I found waiting for me this morning. If we were better students of history, we might realize that, with a more enlightened perspective, our planet’s abundance can still sustain far more than we might imagine––and that our violent protective impulses only engender more of the same. Perhaps there ought to be a corollary to George Santayana’s famous dictum: that those who do learn from the past are doomed––like Cassandra (another echo from the Greeks)––to spend their days shouting out this warning, even when our countrymen seem hellbent on plunging into yet another bloody repetition.
The Red Letters
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