Red Letter Poem #213

 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 #213

 

 

 

 

 

Missing

 

 

 

June dripped its scent––summer rain, / left sketches on my dress  

Desperately, I wrote to you / deleted many times, twisting 

 

adjectives for objective: express / something tender despite tendency  

to guard, harder when words seldom / seem to fit my fancy. Fearful, I culled 

 

substance from every language I could, but couldn’t / find anything real to relay. Really  

just wanted to say: you can’t predict / missing, constantly becomes, daily, 

a new act  

 

 

                                                             ––Lauren Fields

 

 

 

If you’ve been reading my Red Letters for a while now, you’ve noticed how often I highlight the sonic qualities of the featured poem.  If asked to detail which elements captivate in contemporary poetry, I’m sure most of us would prize voice, image, vision, and sound.  And while the contemporary literary trend seems to veer dramatically toward the rhetorical, to my mind it’s still the underlying musical quality that is absolutely vital and most often underappreciated.  I’d argue that the aural structure within the poem––often the result of an intuitive response by the poet, and then clarified during the long process of revision––is responsible for those surprising and deeply emotional effects on a reader, sometimes coloring our response before the conscious mind has fully grasped the meaning of the words. 

 

It’s June, a time associated with love and weddings–– and so I selected a love poem to close out the month.  Love and longing––it’s one of poetry’s prime categories.  And while this is much-explored territory, Lauren Fields still finds a way of refreshing the form and making it her own.  The wistful tone of the piece is present right from its opening line.  What is that mood-setting scent enveloping the speaker?  We imagine the profusion of flowering plants, the intoxicating aroma of the fertile earth, heavy in the rainy atmosphere.  But something else, perhaps more desperate, is wafting in as well.  And while she speaks of her frustrated desire to send the beloved a note that might carry her heart, the rain is busy imprinting designs on this woman’s dress, inscribing its own messages.  There is a reason that love songs gravitate to big plummy vowel sounds to sway a listener: moon, June, bloom, honeymoon.  But Lauren presents a veritable cascade of short-e sounds in her opening couplet––that pinched eh––a much more tenuous and even languishing tonality.  Did your heart register this tremor?  Mine certainly did.  Hope was being tested by those failed attempts, “deleted many times;” and if my pulse elevated just a bit with the chiming “tender” and “tendency,” no less than five more short-e’s flood the following lines, serving to tap the emotional brakes, spur caution.  It seems to me this succinct seven-line poem is a constant battle between a sort of emotional kindling flaring up and the showers of despair dousing the flames.  Even the rhythmic flow of the piece is continually undermined by those slash marks (usually a poet’s notation for line breaks) which, in reading, feel like a repeated catch in the throat; and, of course, they resemble the downpour of anxiety that becomes this poem’s overarching weather.  At the conclusion, the speaker strikes a pose of self-assuredness––that “new act,” a kind of protective device which a distant and equivocal love imposes on this sensitive soul––and we are left unsure whether love or loss is in the forecast.

 

Dr. Lauren Fields (she leaves off the title in her authorial byline, but I can’t help restoring it to her biography) is a psychiatry resident in the MGH/McLean Hospital program here in Boston, and is now entering her 4th and final year.  She tells me she is planning to pursue a fellowship in consultation-liaison psychiatry, with a special interest in working with patients suffering from sickle cell disease.  But, like Dr. William Carlos Williams before her, I suspect she will practice medicine with a poet’s pocket notebook always close at hand.  One of the prize-winners in the 2020 International FPM-Hippocrates Health Professional Poetry Award, Lauren’s poems have been featured in literary magazines such as Blackberry, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, WATER Literary and Arts Magazine––as well as the anthologies A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living; and Corona: An Anthology of Poems.  It is my pleasure that her practice continues to include the Red Letter community.

 

 

 

 

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

 

Red Letter Poem #148

 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 #148

 

 

 

 

It used to strike me as something of a weak gesture: designating February as Black History Month.  As if knowledge should be so circumscribed.  As if maintaining our understanding of history – without gaps and omissions – was anything less than every citizen’s responsibility, all year long.  Doesn’t it go without say that this an integral component of those crucial truths our founding fathers and mothers declared as self-evident?   Do we need to declare out loud: how good the sun above us; or how glad to be breathing – just to get out of bed in the morning?  But now that a number of our once-united States have begun making forgetfulness tantamount to official policy – and the study of Black History a suppressed activity in their schools, if not outlawed altogether – I have come to appreciate that sometimes we all benefit from even the most obvious reminder.  So February brings with it the imperative: learn, remember, share the story of our people’s journey.  All of our peoples.

 

I felt grateful to receive poems recently from a new Red Letter contributor, Dr. Lauren Fields.  She is a second-year resident in the MGH/McLean Psychiatry program here in Boston – but it’s clear she is at the start of two impressive careers.  Poetry, for Lauren, has not been a separate pursuit, but rather an essential practice throughout her medical training, deepening her understanding of self and others.  She reports, as well, that writing poetry has been “a means of grappling with, exploring, and celebrating what it means to be an African-American woman living in the United States.”  Her poems have already begun appearing in literary magazines such as Blackberry: a Magazine, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, WATER Literary and Arts Magazine, as well as the anthologies A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living and Corona: An Anthology of Poems.  She was one of the prize-winners in the 2020 International FPM-Hippocrates Health Professional Poetry Award.

 

In “3 Days”, the speaker brings to mind the story of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman from Naperville, Illinois who was relocating to Texas for a new job.  Stopped for a traffic violation outside Prairie View by a State Trooper, she somehow ended up under arrest where, three days later, she was found hanging in her cell.  2015.  That was not supposed to be the final year in that young woman’s narrative.  Lauren’s poem does not so much as bemoan that fate as it foresees that some similar terror could be her own end, or that of her family and friends.  As a white person, my privilege has been that I did not have to grow up embracing such knowledge.  But history has taught me otherwise; and Lauren’s poem underscores the failure of a country that permits injustice to continue unopposed.

 

And so I found myself today trying to bring to mind as many names, as many fragments of recent history as I can remember: Trayvon, Eric, Tyree, Michael, Tanisha, Tamir, Freddie, Sandra, Alton, Philando, Stephon, Antwon, Botham, Elijah, Breonna, Michael, George, Rayshard, Daunte – and that is only a fragment of the recounting.  Now we’ve added Tyre‘s name to that terrible roster.    Historians help us to understand that the tragic situation of these individuals is not separate from the long historical narrative of our country.  But poets declare – especially because others cannot: how good the sun; how glad to breathe.  Safeguarding history, deepening memory, honoring the truth by facing the whole story and not just the parts that make us feel good: these are simple but necessary tasks if our centuries-long pursuit of happiness is to endure.    

 

 

 

3 Days

 

for Sandra Bland 

 

 

This man-made monster, 

jaws cell-door wide, will swallow 

me, too. Will paint me 

orange, strip-search dignity 

out of my spine. Will fold me  

 

until I fit in  

their story about black rage. 

When they come to you 

and try to explain these graves 

in terms of death penalties 

 

for petty crimes or  

being alive, run. Run, find 

my story buried 

beneath the cell block benches,  

untold. Unfold me. Find me out. 

 

 

      ––Lauren Fields

 

 

 

The 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