Flashback Friday––RLP#19

 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers,

 

The New England Poetry Club’s WE (too) THE PEOPLE poetry series this summer was a tremendous success!  Wonderful poets, enthusiastically received, by large audiences at the Longfellow Historical House.  If you missed any of the readings, you can still view the videos by searching under the series name on YouTube, or by visiting nepoetryclub.org and look for the We (too)… dropdown: Robert Pinsky, Stephanie Burt, Diannely Antigua, Richard Blanco, and Martha Collins.  (And, if I can don my salesman’s hat for a moment, there are still about two dozen of the beautiful We (too)… t-shirts remaining for sale, helping us to earmark funds for the 2026 season of this powerful diversity-affirming project.

 

So I’m taking a little R&R and sending out a Flashback Friday from early on in the history of the Red Letters––updated here and focusing on a stirring Covid-era elegy by Jo Pitkin.  It seems appropriate now, as the infection rate is once again climbing, and certain government officials want to employ the ostrich form of medical intervention: insert head firmly in sand, and the monsters will vanish.

 

Wishing you a safe and calm conclusion to the summer,

Steven

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flashback Friday––RLP#19

 

 

 

 

Luna Moths


On the day I realize my father

might be ill, two luna moths appear



like lime-green handprints stuccoed

on the white walls of my office studio.



This husband and wife come to me

from the boughs of my black walnut tree.



While their spread wings cure, eight

eyespots fix on my clumsy, worried haste.



Because the moths only live to mate,

they do not have mouths. They do not eat.



Flying at night, the moonly moths live

for a week. This is all the span they have.



Now, fading by day like scraps of fabric,

the pair rests. Their feathery antennae tick



lightly in June gusts. At twilight, a sheer

single hand almost waves at me as it flutters



across the pale gold disk fobbed firmly,

like a pocket watch, to the deep blue sky.

 

                                    — Jo Pitkin

 

 

Elegy. Acknowledgement of grief. Awareness of the void we feel in even the most beautiful of summer days. Over seven million families around the world—1.2 million in the United States alone—will forever hear that word, Corona, and feel every nerve in the body plucked like a bass string, reverberating deep. But elegy is one face of a two-sided coin, and the obverse is celebration—knowledge of how a certain face, a familiar voice made our day brim with abiding joy. We each carry our share of unvoiced elegies, for losses great and small; and we must also find in our awareness the possible celebration every new day presents, simply to maintain our humanity. Often a poet’s work assists us in both.



I am struck by Jo’s surprising use of language, subtle but affecting. Think of all the verb choices available to the poet when she describes those two luna moths––fastened? affixed?––no, “stuccoed/ on the white walls of my office studio.” And when those creatures are drying their wings in the sun, I never for a second doubted that her choice of “cured” was anything but a sad double entendre for what even a loving daughter cannot offer her father. Such an accumulation of telling details in the poem: that single pale hand fluttering; that shockingly brief lifespan; that dreamlike pocket watch in the sky––and before we realize it, the moth’s fate, the father’s, and our own are quietly intertwined.



I think of Jo Pitkin as an Arlingtonian—even though, after fifteen years, she traded the waters of Spy Pond for the majestic Hudson River in upstate New York. What I remember best were her tireless labors on the yearly Heart of the Arts Festival, back when the Arlington Center for the Arts was young, helping our town to enjoy the work of painters, dancers, musicians, craftspeople and, yes, poets. Jo’s poems have a painter's eye and a musician’s sense of rhythmic invention. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections including Commonplace Invasions where today’s poem first appeared. “Luna Moths” is sort of a pre-elegy when the prospect of her father’s loss first entered her consciousness. But in my reading, it’s a tribute to our sense of relationship—to the people we most care about and the places that summon our deepest attention. In pronouncing her quiet words, in imagining the brief beauty of the luna moth, we too might feel the complexity of our moment: its somber joy, its pained exultation.

 

 

 

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

 

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 BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com