Red Letter Poem #289

 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 #289

 

 

 

 

 

Survivor

"Like radiation, evil has a long half-life."

––Timothy Garton Ash





Now 98, she has survived Stalin's famine.

She knows what it's like to go without food.

Now, she tends her garden plot:

potatoes, cabbages, onions.



Rifle fire, explosions, occupation.

One Russian soldier shoots the family's barking dog.

"What have you done? That was our protector!"

"I'm your protector now," he says.



Rifle fire, explosions.

Separated from family, fleeing west alone,

no food, no water, on foot,

in house slippers.



Exploding artillery shells, cratered roads. . .

she steps over dead bodies.

walks past cars, trucks:

blasted, smoldering.



Cars, trucks: blasted, smoldering,

roads littered with corpses

98, fleeing west in slippers. . .

She crosses herself; she prays.



98, in house slippers, no food, no water. . .,

she has no use, she says, for Russian "protectors."

Stalin's famine, Putin's invasion:

she's a survivor.

 

                             ––Mark Pawlak

                                   

 

Mark Pawlak’s new chapbook is entitled Special Operation (from Beltway Editions), which is the euphemism used by Vladimir Putin to mask the reality of the brutal invasion and full-scale war raging now in Eastern Ukraine. It’s an offensive that often includes massive missile and drone barrages on city centers like Kyiv and Lviv, as well as the nation’s infrastructure, hoping the blackouts and deep freeze will break this country’s resolve. So far, it seems to be having quite the opposite effect. Despite the Trump administration’s haphazard policies, endlessly waffling on America’s pledge of support (this conflict––we can’t help but remember––he bragged that he’d resolve on his first day in office), Volodymyr Zelenskyy has only gotten more adept at cultivating partnerships with the European Union. They’ve recognized––even if we have not––how dire this threat is to peace and stability everywhere on the continent, if not the planet. Our leader seems more intent on potential hotel developments, lucrative oil markets, and offers of commemorative plaques with his name emblazoned. Meanwhile, on the ground, innocent human beings have their lives upended (or obliterated) daily, while despots like Putin play at hegemony as if it were merely a macrocosmic board game like Risk.



And so poets like Mark offer the useful reminder of how these actions play out on the microcosmic level where actual humans live, breathe. A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported that four years of this war have resulted in nearly two million casualties and deaths––two-thirds of which were suffered by the Russian forces. Yet it seems of little concern to a ruler like Putin who was tutored in Stalin’s rubric: one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. Reading about this destruction from afar, it is easy to become inured to the reporting. But the figure of this 98-year-old woman humanizes the suffering. The poet repeats that number three times, even in this brief poem, so that her century of life on earth can become the yardstick against which to measure our own. Forced from her home by the fighting, she is “fleeing west in slippers...,” and that small detail is simply hard to bear. We can’t help superimposing our own grandmothers’ faces upon hers––and suddenly that tragedy pierces the headlines and casualty reports. What feels most galling is the unbridled power of the invader, cruelty coupled with impunity––an abhorrent combination. Killing a barking dog in response to its distress––that ‘small’ gesture makes our conscience quake. War somehow allows formerly-human beings to morph into cogs in a bloody machine, capable of treating dogs and old women, children and densely-inhabited neighborhoods, as if they were equally unimportant obstacles, dealt with via the uncompromising language of munitions. Of course, no soldier escapes scot-free. The effect these experiences will have is incalculable ––on both ends of the rifle or missile launcher.



Mark Pawlak proudly informs us that he bears the surname of a grandfather born in Lviv, and I’m sure that link has only intensified the poet’s attention. He is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently Away Away (from Arrowsmith Press), and the memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press). Writer, editor, educator, and peace activist, Mark’s poems have been translated into German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and have been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. Widely published, his poetry and prose have graced anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals, as well as scores of literary journals. For nearly four decades, Mark taught mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston––and I’ve always been appreciative of the way his mind swings between the poles of analytic precision and a discursive, unpredictable freedom. This poem is built around a series of repetitions––those blasted cars and trucks, her slippered feet and endless hunger, Stalin’s name wedded to Putin’s––and we begin to feel ourselves trapped in the cyclical nature of history and conflict. In the poems of Special Operation, there are glimmers of hope––but there is no guarantee we, too, will be survivors.  

 

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* 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

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/

Somerville Poet ILAN MOCHARI engages the world with his new book of poetry 'Playthings'

Recently, I caught up with Somerville poet and novelist Ilan Mochari--to talk to him about his new book of poetry "Playthings"  Poet Richard Hoffman writes of the collection:

"Ilan Mochari’s voice in Playthings is exquisite in its range, its responsiveness, its singing. These are poems to be savored and read many times. Whether he is writing about trees native to Mexico, spiders native to his bathroom, or memories native to boyhood, his engagement with the world delivers poems that praise and lament, remember and contemplate. Several are small masterpieces: “Playthings,” “Fiancé, Fiancée,” and “Weekday, City” are jewels. What a treasure. What a pleasure."

Years ago, I interviewed you about your novel Zinsky the Obscure. Now—poetry seems to be a much more important part of your body of work. Explain.


I've always enjoyed writing both fiction and poetry—and I remain ambitious in both genres. More than anything, it's just that Playthings, my new poetry collection, crossed the finishing line before my next novel was ready. But I hope over the next several years to have some new novels to share with the world, too.


You write with great reverence about-- of all things-- spiders, rabbits, etc... I don't think most people would think about the lives of such creatures in their backyard or bathroom, but you do. What's wrong with you? 🙂


Humans are amazing creatures, but I don't know if we produce anything as marvelous as spider silk. Spiders have been on earth for 400 million years—they know how to survive! Lyrically speaking, I love using animals as nouns. Rabbit, armadillo, elephant, camel, raccoon—these words cast potent images and traits in a reader's mind.


I have always thought that buses and trains give us great fodder for poetry. The photographer Walker Evans used a little camera under his raincoat to catch moments on the New York City subway. You have some brilliant poetic snapshots, too. Could you comment on this?


Thank you! I respect the hell out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (who doesn't?). As a daily rider of Boston's trains and buses—and New York's when I was growing up—I've always been amazed by what I saw, heard, felt, and smelled while commuting. Commutes are a window to the world of how we mortals live, think, and behave: perhaps the finest example of this in U.S. poetry is Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." One of my poems in Playthings, "Station," begins with the poem's speaker positioning his camera in the weedy yard where a nameless city stores light rail trains. I've never taken such snapshots in real life—but I've always wanted to!


Your poetry has a cornucopia of images. It has great range—from the banality of a bus to the high holy of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe. Could one say you are a "renaissance man" of a poet?


It would be more accurate (if less flattering) to say, quoting Whitman, that I resist anything better than my own diversity. I'd be hard pressed to develop a collection of my poems (or my short stories for that matter) around a single, specific theme or subject. A broad theme like nature, sure: I can fit the world under that umbrella. But to your point, miscellany's my thing: I have a difficult time writing about the same ostensible topic more than once, unless years have passed between the efforts. My next novel is dramatically different from Zinsky; the poems I'm working on now are like nothing in Playthings. Incidentally, the O'Keeffe poem is also an homage to my mother, who's a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their best one, I might add.


Why should we read your collection?


Lusty escapism. Playthings probes the natural world and the thoughtless harm and joy of our imbalanced tryst with it. Beneath that admittedly broad rubric, you'll find meditations on subjects ranging from moons to gum trees to outfield grass. What you won't find are poems about current events or politics. That's not my bag. Plenty of poets do it, and they do it much better than I ever could. I've never had a passion for the news or elected officials. But what you'll find in Playthings is jubilation: a rolling around in earth's muddy facts, the biological and astronomical truths that transcend trendiness and are thus, in themselves, the purest form of diversion from the puritanical shouts and screams

From the Faraway, Nearby


Take me, docent, to the surreal O’Keeffe,

Where a liminal desert & mountainous sands

Set a brown, jawless skull in abandoned relief.

Bones bloom like blessings from holier lands,

Antlers curl Godward like six withered hands

Or calligraphic Hebrew, draped in the sky,

Near cloud wisps stripped thin by symbolic demands.

As if centuries sidestepping questions of why

Left us only with deer horns to deify.



Docent, lead me to the O’Keeffe eternal,

Where the head of the cervid is floating on high,

As if lifted to heaven by forces maternal.

This canvas depicts, this title affirms

An art in the juxtaposed distance of terms.

Red Letter Poem #288

 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 #288

 

 

 

 

Necking

 

 

Though we were the same age, maybe twelve at the time,

Delores Perkins was a good head taller than me

and a challenge to kiss.  I had to hold my mouth up to hers,

and she had to bend over me and dip her lips to mine

like one of those drinking toy ducks that, once you got it

started, bobbed and bobbed and bobbed, and went on

bobbing until you stopped it, this even when we were

sitting down, side by side in the musty plush seats

of the old Capitol Theater (seats that my mother warned

probably had lice), a flickering, fluttering dusty shaft

of light from the projection booth just over our heads.

 

To take back the initiative, I had to twist myself around,

up onto one hip, and stretch to raise myself to her height,

the elbow of the arm I had around her pressed to the wall

behind us to help me balance, my free hand wanting to cup

one breast or the other but held out and away, squeezing

the arm rest, not permitted by Delores to do anything but 

kiss her and kiss her until I ached from the waist down,

and then, after the movie, the Saturday double feature,

when we stepped out blinking into the afternoon light

Delores—where are you now, Delores?—made me follow

about ten feet behind her because she was taller than me.

 

 

                                             ––Ted Kooser

                                   

 

 

 

 

Indeed: where are you now, Delores?  Ted Kooser has posed the question; and now we, too, would like to know.  Ted––as I’m sure you don’t need me to remind you––is one of America’s most distinguished poets.  He’s the author of scores of books featuring poetry, essay, memoir and children’s stories.  The complete accounting of his honors and awards reads like a densely packed page from the OED, but surely these must top the list: former United States Poet Laureate; winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; and Presidential Professor Emeritus at The University of Nebraska, where he taught younger generations how the dailiness of our lives can yield the most vital and authoritative poems.  I would be remiss if I didn’t add that Ted’s most recent poetry publication is Fellow Creatures, a delightful chapbook of 27 animal and insect poems he published recently with Red Letter Editions to help raise money for this project’s continuance.  (If you have an interest in purchasing copies, you can visit: https://stevenratiner.com/product/fellow-creatures/)  Ted is an 86-year-old, four-time cancer survivor, but approaches each new day with the sort of energy (not to mention a sense of acceptance and gratitude) any of us would feel fortunate to possess.  Nearly every morning, he wakes early and, before the chores of his Nebraska farm, spends an hour or two at his desk, allowing free rein to an imaginative life that seems inexhaustible.  When he shared one of those morning poems with me a while back, I earmarked it for this holiday honoring a third-century Roman saint, where we celebrate love in all its unruly manifestations.

 

The very title of the poem, “Necking,” alerts us to the dated (or one might say innocent) nature of this memory.  When the poet compares Delores’ descending kisses to “those drinking toy ducks that, once you got it/ started, bobbed and bobbed and bobbed, and went on/ bobbing until you stopped it,” how can you not smile and wince at the same time?  Of course, it would be difficult to overstate the vital importance, within the adolescent mind, of how we appear to others.  So while there was a clear attraction between the two twelve-year-olds in Ted’s wry poem––and few forces are more powerful than the hormonal imperative, that dizzying siren song of desire––the fact that the boy was so much shorter was a shame the girl chose not to bear.  And something of that rejection has not lost its sting, three-quarters of a century after those furious bouts of kissing.  I was entranced by the narrator’s gymnastic machinations, trying to regain “the initiative,” hoping he might be able to advance beyond osculation to the storied first or second base of a boy’s yearning.  But Delores had her strict boundaries, and Ted’s “ache” was not to be relieved.  Perhaps that makes the memory all the more enduring.  And that “flickering, fluttering dusty shaft/ of light from the projection booth just over our heads” hints at a more adult, and perhaps less authentic world, towards which these young people are being inexorably drawn.  Many decades later, the ‘movie’ playing inside the poet’s mind has the power to turn back time and restore something of the body’s primal knowledge.

 

As for that pressing question: I believe I can tell you exactly where Delores is.  She is living in the neural village this poet has erected inside his mind.  She is still twelve years old, alluring, a lofty presence for this diminutive boy.   She thinks often of those perpetual kisses inside the intimate movie-theater-darkness––even as she relives a kind of purgatorial embarrassment, always walking away from what might have been true love.  Or teenage lust.  Or simply that half-blind ache whose intensity was meant to instruct us: we are living now.  This is hardly unique to Ted’s experience––we each have built a similar refuge: some situated in the midst of a metropolis of memory; others, a more solitary hamlet on an expansive Midwestern plain.  All we ever were, and all we’ve discovered, remains in residence there––though perhaps there is a propensity among poets to visit them with greater frequency than most.  It is a beautiful anomaly that living now is richer because it contains as well our living then, and also our vivid might have lived.  I, for one, am grateful that poets like Ted Kooser found a way to reproduce that neural landscape in ink, an enrichment for all my living to come.

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* 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

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/