Red Letter Poem #203

 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 #203

 

 

 

Dunlin

 

 

Its breeding plumage so bright

it looks like a different bird

 

just as you in rehab,

or soon after,

 

glowed

with light

 

only to twist again,

dun-colored, into addiction.

 

I wanted to keep that light—

you and I circling the rehab

 

by the horse stables

as you tell me your roommate OD’d.

 

Before leaving I stand before the Memorial Wall:

See you in Heaven/Our forever angel/ Miss you, Daddy—

 

hearts cracked in two.

I retrieve my car keys, cell phone, to head home.

 

Stop time, God!

I yell in my empty car

 

as traffic slows on the Mass Pike

and ahead, blue lights flash.

 

 

               ––Lee Varon

 

 

 

In the catalog of human anguish, certainly near the very top of the list must be the experience of helplessness.  And to my mind, that powerless feeling is more painfully acute when it concerns someone we love––even more so than for our own suffering.  Perhaps a mother’s empathetic connection with her child merits its own special category––and it’s precisely what we’re witnessing in Lee Varon’s new poem “Dunlin.”  In a way, addiction is like a slow-motion car crash––a careening toward disaster, drawn out over months, even years––and loved ones are forced to witness the calamity, hearts constantly bracing for what may be that final point of impact.  At the outset of the poem, our hearts lift a bit with the thought of the Dunlin’s breeding plumage, imagining the long-beaked shore bird resplendent with rust and black stippling across his back.  It’s a reminder that love (or the need for it) has the power to transform.  But again and again, it seems, her son slips back beneath the pain-gray cloak of addiction––and the mention of some other unfortunate soul’s overdose can’t help but chill us at the core.  When the narrator is once again alone in her car, the unbearable pain overwhelms and she screams out for some divine intervention, for time itself to cease––a balm which (at least for this poem) is not granted.  Instead, those flashing police lights on the stalled Turnpike remind us that tragedy may befall any fragile being at any moment, though still we must try to continue on our way.

 

Lee is an award-winning writer of poetry and prose, as well as a social worker by profession.  She won the 19th Annual Briar Cliff Review Fiction contest, and her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous fine journals.  In 2017, Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Affairs Run in the Family and, the following year, she won the Sunshot Poetry Prize for her book, Shot in the Head.  Today’s poem will appear in a forthcoming collection entitled The Last Bed (Finishing Line Press.)  Lee also authored a children’s book about substance abuse disorder: My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery.

 

In another of Lee’s poems, these lines appear: “my poems are small flags/ waving on a red hillside”––and I believe that icon speaks to something essential within her work.  Of course, there is a certain ambiguity about the flags in question: are they ‘red flags’ coloring the hillside––a traditional warning about danger, even impending disaster (and today’s poem is certainly intended to focus our attention on the awful cost of not addressing the opioid crisis engulfing our nation.)  But if the hillside is red on its own, then flags fluttering could be a metaphor for the wildflowers in spring, the ultimate sign of hopefulness––and hope is, quite often, the only response to/remedy for helplessness.  In fact, the very act of transforming a moment of suffering into ink on the page displays an ultimate faith in this confounding existence; it imagines that the writer with the pen in her hand is slightly removed from her counterpart on the page (achieving, perhaps, some slight elevation where the shift in perspective can’t help but broaden our understanding.)  It even envisions the possibility of other eyes who will, sometime, confront these written lines and take their bearings from what has been shared.  Some may even be survivors of a calamity like this one (as is, I am happy to report, Lee’s son), and wish to celebrate the fact that those red flags have miraculously evolved into red-letter days. 

 

 

 

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