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 #296
A Palace of Mourners
I sought to cage memories,
Houdinis escaping
from opaque brain cells harboring
a palace of mourners. In my birth country,
nightsticks swung from Columbus
to modern leaders, fear simmered
and poured into our veins.
After nights of needles pricking my sleep,
floods of images breached the dam of silence.
Joseph, a twenty-six-year-old journalist
arrested in August of ’92, demanded to speak.
My skull became an echo chamber
where the dead reverberated—
their screams shattering corrals of memory,
their tapestry woven with Joseph’s blistered back,
his broken knee, cicatrized head.
The army wanted to teach him
the grammar of silence.
Thin wires glowed,
turned his tongue into an eel,
slapping words into nonsense.
Still, he would not bow or confess.
He trumpeted justice through scars,
through the body’s refusal to obey.
Even with this carnival of nightsticks
and stench, I tried to write
of clouds, of pastoral stillness.
But screams of a valley of Haitians
migrated ferociously across my page,
tearing lilies and dandelions to shreds.
On the palace lawn, no flowers remain––
only the bald eagle’s wings spread wide.
––Patrick Sylvain
“It is difficult/ to get the news from poems…” declares William Carlos Williams (the good doctor thinking about love, the Trojan War, and humanity’s survival). Surveying contemporary poetry, I’d say we can make a strong case refuting that. One evening, I’m listening to Robert Pinsky and his Poem/Jazz ensemble declaiming about the societal and spiritual cost of governmental “Misrule…,”––and the next day, Morning Edition is reporting Hungary has freed itself from the oppressive regime of Viktor Orbán using no munitions other than ballot box, no armed forces beside the battalions of vox populi. Reporting online as I write, a bipartisan group of our Congressional representatives has spurred debate (yet again) on “The Dignity Act,” a previously-abandoned effort at immigration reform––one of the most contentious (and blatantly partisan) hot-button concerns we’re facing today. But alongside NPR bulletins, I’ve been reading Patrick Sylvain’s soon-to-be-published poetry collection, Fire on the Tongue (Arrowsmith Press)––and wouldn’t our politicians be better equipped to consider these fraught issues had they gotten at least a little of their news from sources other than Fox and MSNBC? How about a voice from the Haitian diaspora who can speak authoritatively (heartbreakingly so) about the trials of any beleaguered family trying to survive in an adoptive country––as well as the unbridled terror that would drive them to leave their homeland in the first place?
The weight of Patrick’s family’s history and that of his island-home (and the two constantly intermix in his fraught vocabulary) drive this poet to demand more of language if it is to bear witness to all that’s taking place around him. “I seek words to speak for scorched tongues,” he writes in the poem “Pyramid of Words”––“…in a country where pain burns from bones that beat/ for life, where nightsticks crack skulls, spreading terror.” But as vividly as he describes what is around him, he never loses sight of the unseen forces that helped create this situation in the first place: “I seek words to cleanse the infection of the conquerors’/ languages, their long vowels of repression: the A’s,/ the I’s and the O’s screaming in the night.” In “A Palace of Mourners,” Patrick confronts that history directly because, like the famed escape artist he mentons, memories can no longer remain imprisoned in his tumultuous mind. He centers the poem around the experience of one journalist who could not be broken by the violence––within the regime or outside on the embattled streets. How many news reports from how many locales have we read depicting similar oppression? “The army wanted to teach him/ the grammar of silence./ Thin wires glowed, turned his tongue into an eel,/ slapping words into nonsense.” Perhaps it is the poet’s job to translate that pain into lines that will reach us, perhaps even touch hearts hardened by the propaganda flooding from both sides. “Still, he would not bow or confess./ He trumpeted justice through scars,/ through the body’s refusal to obey.” I think we have much to learn from the poet’s perspective––certainly, to be more compassionate about what’s taking place on distant shores; but also to keep those same horrors from becoming normalized closer to home. When, in the final lines, that raptor spreads his wings on the palace lawn, we have little doubt who that eagle represents.
Patrick is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator. He’s authored several poetry collections in English and Haitian, poems that have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appeared in literary journals in America and beyond. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Currently, he teaches Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University, and recently served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. In addition to this new Arrowsmith title, his forthcoming works include Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) and poetry collections from Central Square and Finishing Line presses. Indeed, “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems,” though far from impossible. We have to broaden our information streams to include the widest variety of voices and visions if we are to develop our own inner editors committed to seeking, if not some absolute truth, then its nearest incarnation. Patrick interrogates both his dreams and nightmares, trying to come to terms with how this world and its politics shaped his existence. It is a necessary undertaking because, without such “news”––as Dr. Williams rightly concluded––“men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”
