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 #312
Cancer Qasida
1.
Praise to the paper gown, vinyl table
sprayed down, still sticky when I sit.
Praise, O nurse in purple shoes,
kindest finger on my bruise, asking
questions to ensure I’m me
and no one else. I’m me. I’m me,
on every floor, in every room
where I repeat name, date of birth
and she checks off a corresponding
doom and doom’s activities, which I praise.
2.
Praise three members of the high school
jazz quartet, studiously tuning in the lobby,
and the man waiting for his wife, counting
almonds into a baggy, the man counting
lengths of sterile plastic tubing. Praise
the doctor who looks so caring and
the doctor behind her, the carousel
of wheelchairs in the hallway—praise them.
I’ve been a different me
since the biopsy needle
became the compass-needle,
since the doctor told me I’m lucky
not to be dying any faster.
O praise the abyss those words split
open under me—praise it.
I’ve learned the shape of the abyss
in which I hear the music
of cancer and faster,
in which I’m gently sent home
to water the dahlias, to let
my nerveless fingers trace two new
freckles (praise them!) on my son’s face.
3.
O praise the music, praise tomorrow’s
sorrow and not-sorrow, praise the mind
narrowed with knowledge, praise
the spells I’ve made and borrowed: love,
luck, forgiveness, fairness, faith
in the idea a “me,” in the idea there will be
another and another day. There’s a cold disk
pressed to my chest, a colder needle in my vein,
a mother making lists, as if it can change everything.
Praise the spell a list creates, praise
the spell of the IV drip, the pills and the pills
to help you tolerate the pills. Praise the gloved hands
that clean up what you can’t keep down. Praise all
the sweating, heaving, freezing, nauseated ones
closing their eyes against this frame, all the ones
who came and sang this song before me, all
the ones still waiting and waiting and waiting.
In my marrow I feel the woman silently crying
in the curtained cubicle beside me,
the man upstairs putting on a brave face for his son,
the family playing cards in reception, the duet
laughing somewhere down the hall—
I can offer them nothing but praise
on the way to the paradise where we’ll meet.
––Kirun Kapur
Today’s Letter is about cancer. . .and praise. At first, you might assume these two words do not/ought not even exist in the same universe. While modern medicine has become much more skilled at detecting and treating this multifaceted category of disease, just the mention of ‘the c-word’ still casts a pall over any conversation. But in the case of Kirun Kapur, a poet of tremendous sensitivity and insight, she is using the heightened consciousness of a poem to demand more: from her response to her own diagnosis and treatment; from her relationships––not only with those she dearly loves, but with all who pass through her days. I believe Kirun is also stretching the boundaries of what she’s prepared to bring to the page, taking to heart the duty that Ralph Waldo Emerson said falls to every practitioner of this ancient art form: "The poet is the person who re-creates the common, who is the public voice of the private heart, and who praises the ordinary." In “Cancer Qasida,” the ordinary ordeal involved in long-term medical treatment––especially for any serious illness––reminds us that it is possible to be both broken- and great-hearted within a single moment.
While the speaker of a poem and the text’s author are not identical, I never had a moment’s doubt that, in this case, the literary was being informed by authentic first-hand experience. And though I’d never suggest that the poem itself was the source of the subject’s courage and determination, I cannot help but believe it fortifies her spirit. Kirun is creating an externalized platform for her own deepest self, and for others in similar circumstances. I’d say that the process she is engaged in echoes Einstein’s breakthrough formulation. The physical and emotional energy in this painful experience (and in the poet’s exacting portrayal) is being converted into matter (ink on paper, or images on a computer screen) so that, when shared with some stranger, the material can be converted back into psychic energy. The reader may, in turn, use this to power their own thoughts and actions, to touch on the challenges of their own unfolding day. E=MC2 indeed!
Kirun chose to create a contemporary version of the qasida––a pre-Islamic Arabic verse form that has since spread throughout the Middle East––and though she dispenses with the set rhythm and single repeating rhyme, her poem chimes with repetition and a heightened musicality; I suspect that a traditional poet writing in, say, Persian or Urdu, might feel a certain kinship. And the three-part form often forms a journey, ranging from court life to the marketplace, but usually culminating in an act of praise. Here, the specificity of images like that “paper gown,” “vinyl table,” and the nurse’s “purple shoes” can be, by turns, both menacing and marvelous. But the brio of her unexpected shifts in context is nothing short of breathtaking––“from biopsy needle” to “compass-needle,” and then the oncologist’s comment that “I’m lucky not to be dying any faster.” Who else but a poet would follow such thoughts as they morph from the doctor’s dispassionate assessment to “the shape of the abyss// in which I hear the music/ of cancer and faster”––and then on to the act of watering the dahlias or touching her son’s newly-freckled face as an intimation of “paradise”?
Kirun is the author of four books of poetry, including: Women in the Waiting Room (from Black Lawrence Press), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Last year, I Ride Upon a Tiger won the Benjamin Saltman Prize, and will be published by Red Hen Press in 2028. Today’s poem was a finalist for the Amy Lowell Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was subsequently nominated and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Kirun serves as editor at the venerable Beloit Poetry Journal, and directs the creative writing program at Amherst College. She grew up between Honolulu and New Delhi, and now lives along the banks of the Merrimack River. Her poem today rings with the litany: “praise”––though the purpose of those imperatives keeps shifting. Because Kirun’s literary experience is far-ranging, she understands that in many of the creation stories pivotal within world religions, humankind begins in a garden and ends in a kind of paradise. But how we live in-between determines the nature of our experience; it either fosters or thwarts the possibility of achieving wisdom and deep (if ephemeral) happiness. Though we may use a multiplicity of names and gestures in our attempt to address divinity, there is great commonality in what we are all yearning for. Perhaps, like superstitious children, we hope things like counting and incantatory list-making will somehow safeguard our fate. Or that if we bow before death’s sovereignty, Thanatos might take pity and spare us. But a poem like Kirun’s is striving to be clear-eyed about the beautiful/brutal nature of our mortality, while still leaning on that primordial pronouncement: it is good. Praise be.
The Red Letters
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