Red Letter Poem #282

  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.

WRENS

Over a door through which I pass from who I am

to the who I will be next, two busy little wrens

have occupied a swallow’s nest, adding their own

belongings to its hard mud cup: discarded feathers,

snippets of grass, a piece of twine unraveling,

and just now they’re defending it against a catbird

twice their size, who struts along a stone wall

near to them, too near to them, and each wren

takes a turn at flying at him, crying in its tiny

voice, then flies back, and the other takes a turn

at the shuttle, weaving with her needle beak

a thin green fabric on the early summer air

upon which one can see what will be left when

all of us have flown: a Japanese lilac bush,

its flowers turning brown already, the wall

with a few bird droppings, and the common cup

of life that fills each morning, then spills over.

 

                                         ––Ted Kooser

None of you needs a reminder that life can be hard work. Still, we marshal our energies and set out each day to accomplish what we can––though sometimes the effort gets the better of us. Then, we’ll let off steam by complaining to whoever loves us enough to listen––as I’ve been doing with increased frequency of late. My to-do list seems never to shrink, no matter how many items I tick off each day. And in the past week or so, the mornings have been bone-chillingly cold; I have to steel myself just to venture out for the mail, let alone to attend meetings or tackle errands. But then I received a note from Ted Kooser––author of nearly fifty(!) collections of poetry, non-fiction, and children’s stories; winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; and a former United States Poet Laureate. Ted has become a long-distance friend and generous supporter of the Red Letters. Two months back, I published a lovely little chapbook of his ‘critter’ poems under the title Fellow Creatures (Red Letter Editions) whose proceeds will go to support this very poetry project. In that day’s e-mail, Ted wrote this: “Now for a cold morning of outside work, wrestling the tire chains and snow blade onto my little Kubota tractor, finger-freezing work that I can't do with gloves on. So it will be done in stages, with breaks inside the house. Once done it's done, and I'm always glad to have this early winter task behind me.” I’ll remind you that Ted is an 86-year-old, four-time cancer survivor. I read his message and quit my complaining on the spot.



The 26 poems of Fellow Creatures, written across many years––and published for the first time in this collection––are a kind of record of his observations and engagement with the natural world around his farm in rural Nebraska. The poems are, by turns, wry, surprising, frightening, provocative, and almost always tender. “Wrens” appears early in the collection and demonstrates how a sharp eye and open heart are capable of engaging us in the small but precious moments of existence. These wrens, nesting above his doorway, are industrious creatures as well; not only do we find them hard at work, constructing a safe space for potential offspring, but they also have to take turns fending off predators who would dine on those delicate eggs if given the chance. No wonder Ted admires their determination. But I love the subtle ways the poet has enlarged this small narrative so that it ends up implicating far more than one avian couple. “Over a door,” he begins, “through which I pass from who I am/ to the who I will be next…”––and we can’t help but consider all the doorways into and out of our days (and existence itself,) and what we come to understand through that effort. No matter the form or materials employed, we each attempt to weave “a thin green fabric” that may make the difference between new life and bitter surrender.



As the poem winds down, it points to that sense of culmination we each work toward––even if we struggle to articulate its importance: “one can see what will be left when/ all of us have flown: a Japanese lilac bush,/ its flowers turning brown already, the wall/ with a few bird droppings, and”––and here’s where we feel something new begin to stir in our own thatched hearts–– “…the common cup/ of life that fills each morning, then spills over.” Filling, spilling, filling again; it’s the hard work and sweet reward of being flesh and blood on this small blue-green habitable planet.



If you’ll permit me to don my salesman’s hat for a moment, I’d like to suggest that there might be some of your own flock for whom these poems would prove a much-appreciated present. Poetry is a reminder of why all that hard work is more than mere responsibility; it is the gift itself. We work with the tools and the materials we have for as much time as we’re given––and gratitude guides us better than regret. "When you arise in the morning,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." Amen. So I’ll paste below the information on how you might acquire your own copy of Fellow Creatures––for pleasure’s sake, and to further the work of the Red Letters.

https://stevenratiner.com/product/fellow-creatures/  To order

Make Poetry a Holiday Gift! Fellow Creatures ­ $15.00  ­ A new chapbook of 26 poems by  Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate. Printed in an edition of 400 copies. Proceeds to benefit  The Red Letter Project  $5.50 shipping and handling (for up to 4 copies in one package) ­ Shop here   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   All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at: https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/

A H A N D P I C K E D P O E M presented by Michael T Steffen

A  H A N D P I C K E D P O E M

presented by Michael T Steffen

Poor Fish

by Lewis Meyers / from Plume 172 December 2025

I saw the loser in 3-card Monte

pleading with the cat who ran the game:

You’ll give me my fifty back, won’t you?

Yesterday payday, rent today.

It’s only fair, chance is unjust,

and this can’t be happening to me,

can it? But above the avenue’s rich rug

the cards continued changing places,

continued slicking through the dealer’s practiced hands,

his dry eye out only for the police.

No one looking on or moving along

took the victim’s part. Where in our

lapsed world do marks find pity?

Pity goes to animals, who can’t help it,

and who try hard to stay away from us

unless a bright prospect entices them,

a lure for innocents. Like the pickerel

I caught who looked at me. Mutely

it beseeched me in the name of all that’s holy

to save it. I ate it, soul and body.

But the hooked man, poor fish, voiced

his complaint and plea, for all the good that did him,

as I heard his cries grow fainter as I swam into

the shadows of towers dangling their lighted suites.

\/ \/ \/

Whoever said The art of losing isn’t hard to master—? Much as I have loved that poem through the years, in all seasons, and through much consideration and much loss of my own, I’ve always thought it somewhat aloof and a matter of exercise, especially for Elizabeth Bishop. There is a sort of easy divinity and wisdom in the attainment—as an “art”—of acceptance. While every mother, widow and therapist will frown with the lot of us in the actual agony of that most unfair event of our being dispossessed : Loss is just something we never really do swallow with much ease, if grace. It strikes us down. It disheartens us. Aggrieves us. Yet—keys, credit card, phone…boat, home…job, bet, contest…parent, spouse, child… however severe or irreplaceable, loss remains the sting of stings, and perhaps only an aging true orphan of philosophy, religion, poverty, or poetry would be able to frame a consolation in acceptance with Bishop’s heart, wit and cultural and historical vantage.

Lewis Meyers’ stunning poem snatches us back unawares into the moment and the existential individuality of the awful moment and its feeling, in the instance of losing one’s rent money to a hustler in a game of three shifted and re-shifted face-down (anonymous) cards—Where’s the Queen? The philosopher and literary critic Joseph Campbell reminds us about the charmed quality of the number 3, its mnemonic resonance in every Tom, Dick and Harry; as well as its count with holiness heard in Trinity and seen in the dancing figures of the classical Graces; but also the recurrence of prongs on the Devil’s pitchfork and the succession of bad things that happen.

The unacceptable lesson is the lesson we seem to need, again and again. As easily as we swallow shiny readily available deals and advantages, we somehow, generation to generation, fail to get this lesson – easy come, easy go – into the understanding and reflexes of our possessive DNA. We remain as gullible to the flashy scam for easy profit as ever before.

The poem’s ending – as I swam into the shadows – does a peculiar thing with language that is characteristic of Lewis Meyers’ knack, to dial up and ring change on our vernacular understanding. His sleight of hand here is similar to that of the title of his 2024 collection Field Notes of a Flaneur, with its odd confusion of an urban observer in a scientific wilderness. The poem’s final lines take the city, which we often refer to as a “jungle” because of its survivalist demands, a feature in the pitiless hustle going on in the poem, and turn it into a psychological sea. I swam… The poet himself identifies with the poem’s eponymous victim, the fish, the city seen as a row of fishermen—the shadows of towers dangling their lighted suites… With the pun between “suites” and sweets, the image of the allures of the city comes easily into focus. There’s a stroke of poetic genius in the trope of making the city a sea, in its visionary correlation with and affirmation of a changing climate and its eventual physical impact on our major cities in their usual coastal locations. On the metaphorical register, the novelty of “sea” for city however must suggest the typological “jungle” of lingo past, and that jungle’s heft of significance in our struggle for civil rights as well as environmental restoration, with the greater tolerance and allowances for language we older readers knew back in the day, pre-911, way pre-Pandemic. Shifts in language measure shifts in temperament, civilized and cultural. Poetry like the other arts are accounts and artifacts so deeply permeated by the actual times, they stand indeed as the true chronicles of those times, our most reliable sources for how things once truly stood in our view of things and ways of expressing them.

Following Meyers’ untimely death in 2020, his wife Diana Tietjens Meyers has continued to curate the best of his poetry. In these past years his work has appeared in Plume, Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, Five Points, Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, and Arkansas International. His book Field Notes of a Flaneur won the 2024 New Measure Poetry Prize and will be published early in 2026 by New Verse Editions.

Red Letter Poem #281

  

 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 #281 

  

 

 

 

 Sexuality  

  

My sexual orientation is Spring. 

––Canadian poet Kyla Jamieson 

 

 

My sexual orientation is November, Morrissey, and Maundy Thursday.  It is the toes of luminous humans peeping out from summer sandals, from Birkenstocks and high heels.  Anglican chant and second-hand bookstores.  Making jokes at my own expense, because I am resilient and I love a good laugh. 

 

My sexuality is tragic: bane and blight instead of blessing and boon.  My sexuality is part of the Male Awkwardness Epidemic.  My groove, the thing that gets me off, is Dylan Thomas.  My kink is society, the myriad communions and communities that give me life, breath, hope.  My safe-words are Easy Does It, One Day at a Time, Next Right Thing.  I’m just another meatball in the sauce. 

 

My sexuality is tongue-tied: reticent and reckless, silly and submissive.  Not knowing which way is up, not caring.  It is all the practices to which I am loyal: prayer-beads, poems, daydreams of humiliation and ecstasy.  My orientation is often dis-.  It is the kneeling namaste I offer to churchmates and to poetfriends.  My creak-boned homage to their ineffable splendor.  My fumbling veneration of their light. 

 

My lovelorn yearnings have made High Honor Roll, have received a certificate of Approbation with Distinction.  My ten-thumbed loves, my wacky crushes: boys when I was in eighth grade, girls my senior year, nobody from my twenties to my forties.  Today, my benedictions fall upon the fluid and the non-conforming; my celibate codgerhood venerates their holy footprints. 

 

My heart’s desire, the music to which it dances, the song it sings to me even as I sleep, is to behold a friend, to hold them and be held by them, to kneel beside their feet and unwrap them like Christmas presents, to solace them with kisses and with tears. 

 

 

                       ––Thomas DeFreitas 

 

 

 

 

 

What could possibly be more fundamental than the right of any individual to define the territory of the self and defend the borders of the communal?  And yet we are seeing an intensified and widespread inclination in recent years: people who are hellbent (and I use that term mindful of its etymological roots) on usurping the legitimate privilege of others.  There are tyrants who unleash the brutality of their armies to try to determine––for a separate sovereign nation––what they would never wish to see prescribed for their own.  And there are some tyrannical ideologues who would oppress certain individuals simply for demanding the choice of how they should be referred to, or whom they might love.  So I was not surprised to see a poet like Thomas DeFreitas––who is fond of musically elaborate verse and philosophically audacious conceits––exercising his right to self-determination via a radical act of the imagination.  And because his approach is both playful and provocative, I think his poem “Sexuality” accrues a kind of persuasiveness capable of skirting the defenses of partisan belief and rational argument. 

 

Thomas’ decision to make this a prose poem (a hybrid form which––I remember one creative writing teacher explaining, back in my ancient college days ––“looks like prose but behaves like poetry”) was, to my mind, a fortuitous one.  Sentences and paragraphs feel much more domesticated than lines and stanzas, and so our minds begin reading ‘for content’ and not style, not the more subversive allure of lyricism and imagery.  Right from the opening ––“My sexual orientation is November, Morrissey, and Maundy Thursday.”––I found myself backpedaling a bit, surprised by where the speaker was leading me.  Still, I could not resist smiling at the alliterative flourish, and the incongruity of sexual orientation being defined by what, at first glance, seemed to be random associations: the autumnal season, a pop icon, the religious holiday.  But on my second go-around, I had to pause to reflect on the emotional amalgam that was teased out so deftly: we begin with the dim and moody skies of November; compound that with the dark humor and sexual longing from the Smiths’ former front man; and intensify the collage with mention of the pre-Easter celebration marking the occasion where Jesus first gave his disciples the Eucharist, pairing it with the “new commandment" to love one another.  (And in the current political climate, doesn’t that, too, feel like a revolutionary proposition?)  The surface playfulness belies the urgent purposefulness of what’s being conveyed.  The poem reveals and conceals––sometimes within the course of a line or two––and so we experience a kind of tentative tenderness mounting as we read.  How revealing can the speaker dare to be in print’s public forum?  How intimate can a stranger become, using only inky signs instead of touch? 

 

Thomas is no stranger, though, to the Red Letters, first appearing way back in 2020 when this poetry project was just underway.  His publisher, Kelsay Books, has issued four full-length poetry collections, including this year’s Walking Between the Raindrops.  A chapbook, Elegies & Devotions is in production.  Thomas’ style generally offers a more customary version of lyricism, but I’m always intrigued when he carves out a path into new territory.  The musicality is still present here (“…bane and blight instead of blessing and boon”).  But because he’s warned us––“My orientation is often dis-.”–– I was only too happy to buckle up and ride this emotional rollercoaster.  And despite the jagged twists and turns, in the end, who would not want to be ‘unwrapped like a Christmas present,’ to have some beloved friend ‘solace us with kisses and with tears?’  Of course, Thomas gets to answer for Thomas; Steven for Steven; you, gentle reader, for you.  Having paid the enormous fee to board this wild ride––our mortal vulnerability, our deepest attention––shouldn’t we each, at the very least, be able to determine what we’ll be called upon boarding, with whom we’ll share the experience, and how we will prepare ourselves for the conclusion when the rattling wheels come to a stop?  

 

 

 

 

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: