Red Letter Poem #271

 Red Letter Poem #271

 

 

In Our Time


1



Men back from the front say:

In the trenches, it’s hard to find anyone

Who refuses to pray.



2



“The Truth exists within a cannon’s range”

This is a popular expression these days.

Poets without cannons, where is your truth?



3



In our time,

Some cannons have pretty flower names,

“carnation” for instance...

While some concentration camps are hidden

In a fairyland of angelic birch trees.



4



A country as “united” as a “pomegranate”

A country composed of dozens of marshes

A country driven by tanks and “The Noseless Slut”*

A country in the dragon seat

A country controlled by the sorcery of soul-stealers

A country hanging, swaying from a tree’s crooked neck

A country where prosthetics stock soars in value



5



He was released. The sack covering his head was removed.

He found himself in an open field in early autumn.

He could run to freedom with open arms.

What he didn’t know, is that he had been left in

The middle of a beautiful––

filled with drifting golden leaves––

Minefield.

                                                                      (April, 2023, New York)

 

 

                                        ––Wang Jiaxin

                                   

(translated by John Balcom)

 

 

*The Noseless Slut--death. (The word for death in Russian is of feminine

gender).  See the third part of Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Poem without a Hero.’

“The empire in ruins––rivers and mountains remain.” Du Fu’s opening line is one of the most famous in all of Chinese poetry, and hints at the somewhat conflicted allegiances poets had to maintain throughout Imperial history. With the exception of those strange souls who chose to opt out of society, living in seclusion, ancient poet/scholars were generally an official part of the governing apparatus. Their writing reflected the mood of the people, lionized the emperor’s glories, preserved histories and traditions, and cultivated the blessings of the heavens. But I suspect the temperament of individual poets was likely not so very different from that of our contemporaries: awed by the natural world, delighted by the love of family and friends, made solemn by an understanding of our mortal fragility––and these tendencies were amplified by Taoist principles and the amalgamation of Buddhism into the culture. Du Fu, thought by many to be China’s greatest poet, was so devastated by a ruinous civil war that tore through the Tang Dynasty, he eventually resigned his official post and returned to an impoverished private life––only partially comforted by his awareness that, while power-crazed leaders carved their bloody paths, nature’s realm would survive them all.



Wang Jiaxin is one of China’s finest contemporary poets and, in my reading of his work, a direct descendant of Du Fu and his blend of personal exploration and social observation. Working my way through At the Same Time: New and Selected Poems (about to be published by Arrowsmith Press, and skillfully carried over into English by John Balcom), it’s clear that he takes seriously both spheres of a poet’s responsibility: to sing out of the intensities of an individual’s experience, but to cry out loud at the brutality and injustice inflicted on people living everywhere and under every banner. In what is often called his most important poem, “Pasternak” (many of Jiaxin’s verses highlight the achievement and the suffering of fellow writers across the globe), he offers the lines: “The darkness and hunger in the people’s bellies, how/ Can I ignore this just to talk about myself?” Recently, the wanton suffering being inflicted on Ukraine (spurred by another power-mad emperor’s reckless aspirations) has become a frequent focus in his writing––and I selected “In Our Time” for today’s Red Letter because those antiphonal aspects of a poet’s self are so marvelously implicated. In the poem’s five sections, he challenges the capacity of our hearts and minds as we try to keep up with the verses.



Section one starts off with what has become a truism from the millennial history of war: the closeness of death makes every beleaguered individual seek out some God to whom he/she can appeal (or, in the popular adage from World War 2, ‘no atheists in a foxhole’). Even for those who have not witnessed a battlefield, the second stanza is deeply resonant: that “The Truth [with a capital-T] exists within a cannon’s range,” because the nearness of oblivion demands a radical perception of the moment. Then, to what absolute can we civilian poets turn––we who are blessed with abundance and do not wake and sleep within earshot of drones and missile strikes? Section three teases out intimations of life and death, heaven and hell, from what surrounds us every day. But then the poem intensifies, shifts direction with section four’s litany; perhaps you felt, as I did, that the poet’s anger seemed to be scarcely contained. I had little trouble imagining who those “soul-stealers” were, and upon whom their sorcery was being worked––our beloved homelands swinging from nooses we did little to prevent. The only industries prospering in such a world are the ones that trade in misery.



Born in Hubei Province, Wang Jiaxin was among the multitudes sent to the countryside for labor and reeducation. When the furor of the Cultural Revolution ended, he attended Wuhan University, and later worked as a teacher, editor, translator, and critic. He was a professor of literature at Renmin University in Beijing until his retirement in 2020. As author of over forty books, he’s won numerous domestic and international awards, and has had a deep influence on the poets of China and far beyond. He now spends most of each year in New York City. Reading his poems, I am reminded of why poets are often targeted by authoritarian regimes: because sometimes the truth of a dozen lines has the potential to upend how we’d been experiencing our days, to make us hunger for more. But the attempt at such honesty places one in personal danger––like the figure in the final section of today’s poem. A prisoner of some unnamed force, at last the sack is removed from his head, and he’s set free––only to discover he's in “The middle of a beautiful––filled with drifting golden leaves––Minefield.” Those intrusive em dashes feel like prison bars and yet, between them, perhaps only a poet would notice what vibrant beauty is everywhere available. That is the dilemma we are all being forced to navigate: beauty endures, but the minefield encloses it. What are we willing to do for one more afternoon of such possibility? This poet’s made his choice. (Is that cannon fire I’m hearing in the distance?) Perhaps, soon, we’ll be required to make ours.

 

 

   

 

 

The Red Letters

 

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My Messy Mistake: Dying Taught Me I Feared Life More Than Death by Diana Kouprina

I met poet/writer Diana Kouprina at a meeting of my literary group the Bagel Bards, which meets every Saturday at Cafe Zing in Porter Square. She has had a hardscrabble background, but has overcome this and now she is a prolific writer and social media personality.

 My Messy Mistake: Dying Taught Me I Feared Life More Than Death

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. I wasn’t suicidal, per se — I just didn’t mind if I died. There was nothing to live for, my life at the time was stuck in a survival loop. I was a “high-functioning addict.”I had convinced myself that snorting heroin wasn’t addiction—it was medicine which I needed to sustain myself, especially when my prescription to benzodiazepine was just not doing the trick.

At the time, I worked retail and was going to school at Suffolk University. The paychecks couldn’t cover the drugs my ex-husband and I consumed. To make ends meet, I turned to escorting. That was my double life: folded sweaters and bright store lights by day, quiet transactions and blurred nights by necessity. All of it in service to an addiction I kept convincing myself wasn’t real.

One ordinary day in 2007, at 23, I wanted to unleash my creative spark. I was preparing an assignment for a creative English class. I remember how the words were hard to access. I wrote best when I was high or drunk. I preferred to write high. It started like a slow progression sneaking over to the safe, punching in the code, taking out the little plastic container and taking a tiny sip, then putting it back, going to the computer, trying to write, voice not coming through, needing more and repeating this process over and over again until, I had poured almost all of my ex-husband’s 200 mg cherry-flavored methadone into myself. I wrote furiously, believing I was channeling Hemingway. When I finished, I crawled into bed, floating in euphoria. To make the high last, I popped a few benzos. I thought I was going to sleep. Instead, I slipped into death.

What happened next is hard to describe, because it felt more real than any dream or reality I have lived in. It felt like my soul returning home consumed by a magnitude of feelings. My great-grandmother, who had passed in 1994, was there. So was my Babushka Hasmik, who had died just a few years earlier. I never had a chance to say goodbye to either of them, since my arrival in the U.S. at the age of nine from the Former Soviet Union and although I entered the country legally, I didn’t have permission to travel outside the U.S.. Thus, I never had closure from their deaths; instead, their absence had left a wound inside me, which had consumed me into a bubble made up of fear of abandonment.

And now, there they were. In my death, I saw them. I felt them. It was as though I had just woken from a nightmare and in my purest form, surrounded by love.

In that moment, I realized something shocking: I didn’t fear death. I feared life.

Waking up was the terrifying part. Cold fluorescent lights. The sharp, sterile smell of the ER. My body was shaking uncontrollably, as though it had frozen stiff while I was gone, and now that I was back inside myself, I couldn’t get warm. Doctors and nurses hovered, their voices clipped and urgent. One said it was nothing short of a miracle that I had come back.

When the machines were finally removed from me, I asked for more blankets with chattering teeth, when they offered me ice chips for my throat.

I didn’t feel like a miracle. I felt ripped away. Ripped from love, from peace, from the only place I had ever felt completely safe. Coming back to life meant being dragged once again into the weight of my shame, my addiction, my trauma. It was not relief I felt in those first moments, but grief.

Yet, though I didn’t know it then, something had shifted. In death, a seed of light had been planted in me. Slowly, stubbornly, it pushed me toward transformation. The losses, the addictions, the trauma, the abuse—all of it became essential material for a long and brutal process of self-reclamation. Reflecting now, it is hard to even understand how I did it all on my own, that type of healing capacity and rewiring could have only occurred because of divine intervention.

Recovery wasn’t linear, but neither is life. There were jagged moments, relapses, and heartbreak. I had to lose people, illusions, and versions of myself I thought I couldn’t survive without. But every loss became necessary for healing—past the drug addiction, past sexual abuse, past the deep trauma that had kept me caged.

Dying was my messy mistake. But living—choosing to keep living—became my revolution.

I don’t romanticize the chaos. I don’t call it beautiful. But I acknowledge its role. Without those mistakes, I wouldn’t be here. Without death and return, I wouldn’t understand how precious life is—or how fiercely transformation can happen.

There was no one mistake that led me to my fall. As much as I always wanted to pinpoint to one moment it is not possible. My mistakes were created out of immense self hate, I believed myself to be a worthless human. It has been a journey of reclaiming myself, my worth and my confidence. I am learning now to stop questioning myself, and the universe in doubt. I am embracing the fact that my life is a mosaic of mistakes. In my death, I learned about the value of my life lived steeped in purpose from within.

About, Letting Go

I have hang ups, I hold on too tight,

A broken record playing on the loop,

I seek to find my flaw, my fault, my failure.

I play it all on repeat mode inside my brain.

Always too terrified to seek the truth

Thinking it’s me,

the problem,

the flaw,

the failure.

Believing that I am the monster in the mirror,

Too scared to look and see, of what I would find staring back at me.

But, it’s over now, I hope. I let it go, I broke the cycle of repetition.

I rinsed the dread out of my hair,

I felt the truth, the fault, the flaw, the failure

It wasn’t me it was someone else I had tried so hard to be.

I let it go, I know my fault,

I was naïve, a frightened child with no love to feel.

I trusted easily, always believing everyone else was better off than me.

As the years would passed, rolling into one season after another,

I remained caged in, to escape the prison, I was forced to see,

My choices made of terror, had tarnished me complete.

To revert back to me, to wash the tar out off my body,

I had to see, my mistakes were mine to own,

Mine to learn from and to let go,

Only then did the windows of my prison began to open letting in an airy breeze

Within this healing road I’ve chosen, of loving me complete.

C’est La Vie

This is life, I am forty-one,

I pedal one sandaled foot after another, pushing down on flower pedals, in shape of petals

The number frightens my mind made up of stress, awakening my fear of loss.

Luckily my soul is there to provide solace to the mind, I trust the words,

That a little voice utters from within,

Age is just a number, what matters most is hidden from the eyes to see.

The freeing feeling takes on flight, as my mind retires and my soul takes charge,

C’est la vie, I like this life, I am grateful for the second chance,

To be past the brinks of death

I ride my bike, I pedal on,

I unclench my grip from leather handle bars,

Blue and white flowers all over, woven wicker basket in the front, propel me on.

I go back in time of childhood self, of bikes and friends, of reading books,

never free, mistrusting the body, and the soul, as shame and guilt ate away at me,

All before my teenage self was able to emerge, a perfect child I forced myself to be.

I know it doesn’t matter, what age I turn this year,

The enchantment with perfection is not a part of this life I lead,

I ride my bike, I pedal on, pushing down in confident stride,

Making my way through the color scented leaves of fall,

Past the bunnies jumping through the yards

Through the tree tunnels made up of branches

I find my wings, I take on flight,

I soar through the moonlit nights listening to crickets chirp their lust

.

I feel it now, this is life, a fluid soul traveling between realms, of past, of present and future self,

Within the vastness of the universe,

Always knowing what matters most is hidden from the eyes to see.

C’est la vie, I tell myself, I feel it now.

---

Author Bio (for submission):

Diana Kouprina is the author of Borderline: A Poetic Memoir (Wild Press, 2025). She writes about statelessness, survival, and self-reclamation. She is the host and producer of W.I.L.D the Podcast