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 #160
Apple
Waiting for my older brother to burst from
the first grade, my mother and I sit
on a playground bench overlooked by
the cliffs of West End tenements.
The confetti of a shattered beer bottle
sparkles in sharp September sunlight.
My mother reaches into her canvas bag
for an apple. I love to watch her
grip an apple in both her hands
as if she’s praying, each hand twisting
the sweet globe in opposite directions,
what her mother in Poland taught her,
until the apple snaps in half. So much more
than magic or mystery, this is her miracle.
She hands me half the apple,
saves the other half for my brother,
tells me we must eat all the joy
and wisdom the world has to offer.
––John Pijewski
Eve’s given a bad rap. The Mother of all Mothers was, in certain mythological portrayals, branded as the source of all sin. It’s a psychological burden passed down from mother to daughter for millennia – but it’s a narrative that feminist poets and artists (both woman and men) have been working earnestly to shift, gaining steam in the 20th century and continuing today. And not only has Eve’s iconography evolved, so has our view of that fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. In one sense, humanity’s hunger for discovery is seen as an essential part of our nobler instincts. But having witnessed where an ill-considered quest for knowledge has sometimes taken us (I’m thinking about you, Robert Oppenheimer – and I’m fretting about you, Silicon Valley wizards, unleashing AI into the cerebral marketplace), it behooves us to take a breath, to think long and hard about the conceptions we are feeding into the culture.
And so, just in time for Mother’s Day, here is a new poem from John Pijewski, author of Dinner With Uncle Jozef (Wesleyan University Press). It’s both a reclamation of personal memory and a quiet attempt at myth-making with a (literal) twist. John shared with me his manuscript-in-progress entitled Collected Father; a mammoth undertaking, he’s excavating a trove of painful memory that is both familial and historical. His father and mother spent years in a Nazi labor camp and, having been thoroughly brutalized there, they unfortunately carried that pain with them when they settled in the New World. I think John is attempting to write his way into a clarity about the Adam and Eve of the tortured garden into which he and his brother were born. But having brought his unflinching eye to witness again that old suffering, I find it inspiring that some gentler recollections have now begun to emerge. And, when John showed this poem to me, the little vignette in “Apple” simply got under my skin. In part, it’s because I, too, still possess fragments of time spent alone with my mother; I remember how everything she did seemed to have a monumentality about it, an aura of deep knowledge tinged with undefined sorrow. After all, our forebears are the ones who first introduced us to, well, everything. Are we ever really aware of how much of our parents’ lives have been inscribed upon our hearts? I will leave the poem to offer up its quiet pleasures, except to add that John assures me the special skill discussed in this piece was actual and performed without any tools beyond his mother’s two capable hands. He said it so fascinated him as a little boy, he’d ask her to do it over and over – thus necessitating the consumption of bushels of the fruit – and yet he somehow never mastered the trick. “It seems to be one of the great talents that Polish women possess.” And yet something that woman was offering her little boy – sweet, tart, nourishing – persists in his imagination today.
The Red Letters 3.0
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* 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
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