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 #289
Survivor
"Like radiation, evil has a long half-life."
––Timothy Garton Ash
Now 98, she has survived Stalin's famine.
She knows what it's like to go without food.
Now, she tends her garden plot:
potatoes, cabbages, onions.
Rifle fire, explosions, occupation.
One Russian soldier shoots the family's barking dog.
"What have you done? That was our protector!"
"I'm your protector now," he says.
Rifle fire, explosions.
Separated from family, fleeing west alone,
no food, no water, on foot,
in house slippers.
Exploding artillery shells, cratered roads. . .
she steps over dead bodies.
walks past cars, trucks:
blasted, smoldering.
Cars, trucks: blasted, smoldering,
roads littered with corpses
98, fleeing west in slippers. . .
She crosses herself; she prays.
98, in house slippers, no food, no water. . .,
she has no use, she says, for Russian "protectors."
Stalin's famine, Putin's invasion:
she's a survivor.
––Mark Pawlak
Mark Pawlak’s new chapbook is entitled Special Operation (from Beltway Editions), which is the euphemism used by Vladimir Putin to mask the reality of the brutal invasion and full-scale war raging now in Eastern Ukraine. It’s an offensive that often includes massive missile and drone barrages on city centers like Kyiv and Lviv, as well as the nation’s infrastructure, hoping the blackouts and deep freeze will break this country’s resolve. So far, it seems to be having quite the opposite effect. Despite the Trump administration’s haphazard policies, endlessly waffling on America’s pledge of support (this conflict––we can’t help but remember––he bragged that he’d resolve on his first day in office), Volodymyr Zelenskyy has only gotten more adept at cultivating partnerships with the European Union. They’ve recognized––even if we have not––how dire this threat is to peace and stability everywhere on the continent, if not the planet. Our leader seems more intent on potential hotel developments, lucrative oil markets, and offers of commemorative plaques with his name emblazoned. Meanwhile, on the ground, innocent human beings have their lives upended (or obliterated) daily, while despots like Putin play at hegemony as if it were merely a macrocosmic board game like Risk.
And so poets like Mark offer the useful reminder of how these actions play out on the microcosmic level where actual humans live, breathe. A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported that four years of this war have resulted in nearly two million casualties and deaths––two-thirds of which were suffered by the Russian forces. Yet it seems of little concern to a ruler like Putin who was tutored in Stalin’s rubric: one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. Reading about this destruction from afar, it is easy to become inured to the reporting. But the figure of this 98-year-old woman humanizes the suffering. The poet repeats that number three times, even in this brief poem, so that her century of life on earth can become the yardstick against which to measure our own. Forced from her home by the fighting, she is “fleeing west in slippers...,” and that small detail is simply hard to bear. We can’t help superimposing our own grandmothers’ faces upon hers––and suddenly that tragedy pierces the headlines and casualty reports. What feels most galling is the unbridled power of the invader, cruelty coupled with impunity––an abhorrent combination. Killing a barking dog in response to its distress––that ‘small’ gesture makes our conscience quake. War somehow allows formerly-human beings to morph into cogs in a bloody machine, capable of treating dogs and old women, children and densely-inhabited neighborhoods, as if they were equally unimportant obstacles, dealt with via the uncompromising language of munitions. Of course, no soldier escapes scot-free. The effect these experiences will have is incalculable ––on both ends of the rifle or missile launcher.
Mark Pawlak proudly informs us that he bears the surname of a grandfather born in Lviv, and I’m sure that link has only intensified the poet’s attention. He is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently Away Away (from Arrowsmith Press), and the memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press). Writer, editor, educator, and peace activist, Mark’s poems have been translated into German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and have been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. Widely published, his poetry and prose have graced anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals, as well as scores of literary journals. For nearly four decades, Mark taught mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston––and I’ve always been appreciative of the way his mind swings between the poles of analytic precision and a discursive, unpredictable freedom. This poem is built around a series of repetitions––those blasted cars and trucks, her slippered feet and endless hunger, Stalin’s name wedded to Putin’s––and we begin to feel ourselves trapped in the cyclical nature of history and conflict. In the poems of Special Operation, there are glimmers of hope––but there is no guarantee we, too, will be survivors.
The Red Letters
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