Red Letter Poem #178

 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 #178

 

 

 

 

 

Pandemic Days

 

 

Cloud of white blossoms

fills my front window:

curbside ornamental pear.

 

Out back, my cherry graft:

cascading umbra of tendrils

tied with delicate white bows.

 

Next door the magnolia

offers magenta-edged petals

by the fistful,

 

and every neighborhood street’s

festooned: apple blossoms,

apples blossoms, apple blossoms.

 

But grand prize

belongs to the purple plum

next block over

 

more precious

for the brevity of its flowering.

It takes my breath away!

 

Meanwhile, behind closed doors,

human life           

its fragility:

 

flowering of

the sick, bedridden,

the dying, intubated,

 

the dead.

 

 

                   ––Mark Pawlak  

 

 

 

Autumn––the calendar’s made it official––even though, where I live, it’s felt like the season changed a while back: brisk winds, lashing rains, apples toppling from our Northern Spy––but interspersed as well with those precious short-sleeve windows-open kind of Indian summer days.  To be honest, when Mark Pawlak first sent me “Pandemic Days”, I imagined publishing it as a sort of memorial to those dark times past––the devastating power of pandemic now more of a receding memory, even as we’re mindful of the toll taken these last three years, on the living as well as the dead.  Yet recently I’ve found myself feeling a surprising sense of safety: visiting friends and family, dining indoors at restaurants, even attending crowded concerts––any sense of concern, a muffled whisper in the background of my mind.  I was cognizant of the risk––but, vaccinated and reasonably healthy, proceeded as if the worst was behind us.

 

And perhaps it is––but the Boston Globe reports the infection rate is ticking upward, and Massachusetts currently has nearly 2800 confirmed Covid cases with 29 deaths this past week.  So this morning I am turning from headlines to poetry in search of a different sort of data.  Blissfully, it’s still spring inside Mark’s poem, and his is the sort of attentive mind that savors the abundant sensory data cascading toward us at every living moment.  As his eye takes careful note of alluring images, his ear records the musical intensities of his own thought process; listen to the rhythmic thrust of a phrase like “curbside ornamental pear”––so mundane and yet so utterly beautiful.  But, as the tercets descend, the poet ups the aural intensity: that branch on his cherry tree, is a “cascading umbra of tendrils/tied with delicate white bows.”  We find ourselves standing beneath, and engulfed by, this lush beauty––but (and this realization dawns on us quietly) also standing with the poet, with all the other eyes who might glimpse this scene.  Perhaps it even takes our breath away (as it does Mark’s)––but ‘breathlessness’ (Covid reminded us) is a two-edged sword.  “Meanwhile”––says the poet, abruptly shifting gears with a fresh stanza––“behind closed doors. . .”.  And, of course, those doors swing open in our imaginations, and we find ourselves abiding as well with those suffering souls for whom this moment, this season is the most tenuous.

 

This is one of the reasons I value Mark’s poetry: it’s not distanced from us by its poetic stance; often written in galloping colloquial cadences, it assumes the sort of welcoming attitude that Walt Whitman first recommended for American poets.  The author of nine previous volumes of poetry––including Reconnaissance: New and Selected poems & Poetic Journals (from Hanging Loose Press)––Mark is about to publish a new collection entitled Away Away where “Pandemic Days” will appear.  This piece offers us a fresh vantage point, a shift of perspective: at times, the eye’s lens does a slow pan; at others, it zooms in for a dramatic close-up; but always (and perhaps most significantly) illuminated with a sense of the communal––that we are not alone in what we are seeing.  And so there it is, those undeniable cycles to which all the living are subject: those flowering trees. . .and then the ripening fruit. . .and then the seeds, fallen, entering the earth. . .and perhaps, even in grief, the thought of next year’s flowering.

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* 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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner