Red Letter Poem #275

 

The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind



The seventh annual Red Letter LIVE! reading

Saturday, November 8th 2025

Robbins Library, Community Room, 700 Mass Ave, Arlington

1-2:30pm, (music beginning at 12:45pm)

with a reception to follow

Free, and all are welcome!

Featured poets:

Massachusetts’ first Poet Laureate

Regie Gibson

Ukrainian-American poet

Dzvinia Orlowsky &

Red Letter founder

Steven Ratiner

reading from his own work

and a new chapbook by Ted Kooser

benefiting the Red Letter Project

with a musical performance by bassist

Rick McLaughlin

More details in attached flyer.

A reception will follow the reading.

If you’re nearby, we’d love to see you there




Hosted by

Steven Ratiner and Jean Flanagan

 

Red Letter Poem #275

 

умШум

(Ukrainian word for the sound of wind in trees)

Russified, having lost its original meaning,

this rustling wooded breath was leveled

to noise—a loud whistling

through broken windows, an invisible

heavy scuttling among ruins.

It favored crackling trees

against a blanched sky, unmoored

echoes claiming rivers

before they dried— bird calls

from censored dictionaries,

ruffled feathers—

No one heard its leaving.

Only a few held on to the word’s original meaning,

taking it with them into the next life

the way a child might drag a torn blanket.

Could I have saved its fragile

word stem, pressed it between

the pages of my childhood diary,

protected it from becoming sirens, air traffic,

construction sites, fireworks—

crowds breaking apart

their names lost in the smoke.

Шум. A sound I used to know.

Today, walking in woods, I listened for wind

while mercy falls apart into a deck of cards—

the new go-to phrase for negotiating peace.

This noise saves no one.

We fall silent, then eerie quiet,

before the next sounds begin.

Even a dead crow on the road

might raise one wing to the wind

to feel itself once more part of a forest

that takes it in.

––Dzvinia Orlowsky

When, in the third century BCE, the leader of the Qin people finally conquered the last remaining neighboring kingdom––thus uniting for the first time what would become known as China––he set about solidifying power in his vast lands. Among his strategies, two stood out: he ordered (at tremendous cost) the construction of one unified defensive structure––expanding on the many piecemeal sections that already existed––to curtail the offensive advantage of the Mongol invaders from the north. (History does not record whether his armies rallied before the palace, chanting: ‘Build the Great Wall!’) But a second approach was equally important: from then on, by law, there would be only a single style of written language allowed, supplanting all those that had developed in the fifty-plus indigenous peoples across this giant land mass. Creating a new name for his exalted position––the Qin Shi Huangdi, Emperor of the Qin––he believed he had established an empire that would last a thousand years. This strategy of linguistic hegemony has been repeated, in various incarnations, by most conquering powers over the centuries as a potent tool for asserting political and cultural dominance. You can think of the burning of Mayan-language books by the Spanish, or the suppression of Gaelic in Ireland by the British. How many Native Peoples here in our own country had their children forced to adopt a new tongue and new gods? The stunning Ukrainian-American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky began to pay special attention to the effects Russification had on the language she grew up speaking. Pronunciations shifted, meanings altered or were erased––even those names for everyday experiences––all supplanted by Russian terminology. It was part of an effort to persuade the citizenry to accept the false narrative that an independent Ukrainian country and culture never existed. This is one battle where poets and writers need to marshal their lexical troops and lead the counteroffensive.

In a series of poems (which I’m hoping will grow into a whole section of some future book), Dzvinia focuses on a single Russified word and tries to conjure, not only something of its Ukrainian past, but the intimate way those syllables once lived inside her mouth and imagination. Today’s Red Letter is the first of two I am delighted to offer readers. Entitled Шум (using the Cyrillic alphabet that became welded onto Ukrainian), the word should be pronounced ‘shum’ (with that long u-sound puckering the lips). Originally signifying the sound of rising wind through leaves, it has come to mean––in both Ukraine and Russia––simply ‘noise.’ As Dzvinia explained to me: “As a first generation Ukrainian-American, I grew up in Ohio surrounded by meadows and tall, thin trees. The shum of a pre-storm wind was a deeply sensory experience. I cannot begin to think of it as ‘noise’”––though, sad to say, our urban life has certainly become more of a place for jarring sounds, and only rarely for the calming. But when the poet writes of “a loud whistling// through broken windows, an invisible/ heavy scuttling among ruins,” it is impossible not to imagine the current situation in her family’s homeland where some noises presage drone strikes and cries from beneath rubbled apartments. It seems each day brings a fresh barrage of bad news––not just for Ukraine but our whole beleaguered planet. So perhaps it is even more imperative that, in the face of the onslaught, we cling to the most precious and personal of our dreams––and, of course, the deep-rooted utterance in which we first learned to express them. Poets attempt to bring that experience back to us––those dreams, that imaginative and linguistic autonomy.

As a poet and translator, Dzvinia’s authored of seven books, including A Handful of Bees from Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series; and Bad Harvest, a Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read.” Her newest collection, Those Absences Now Closest, is focused on the tragic conflict in Ukraine. Dzvinia’s been awarded the Samuel Washington Allen Prize (selected by Robert Pinsky) from the New England Poetry Club. Her Ukrainian co-translations with Ali Kinsella of Natalka Bilotserkivets's and Halyna Kruk's poetry, have been short-listed for such prestigious honors as the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the 2025 PEN American Literary Award in Translation. Her service to poetry more broadly extends to her work as a co-founder of Four Way Books, one of our mainstay literary presses. I’ll add one more very small accolade to her list: beginning with the first time I read today’s poem in a batch Dzvinia sent me, I now hear the drawn-out syllable shoooom whenever––as it is now–– the wind is rising outside, stripping some of the last pale leaves from my dogwood, making my spine shiver. There is a kind of knowledge which poets transmit that alters lives––the very reason tyrants take pains to suppress the arts. So I’ll add one last thought to this Letter: the Qin Shi Huangdi’s ‘kingdom of a thousand years’ ended up destroyed after a mere fifteen. It’s a fact that the Red Emperor in Moscow and the Orange wannabe-Emperor in Washington might do well to keep in mind.

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:

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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 BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter

@StevenRatiner


All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/