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Last night I had a phone conversation with a friend from Austin: a sophomore in college, a girl I adore, a dear soul who has been battling cancer for the past few years. She texted me while I fed the boys their dinner. She asked if we could talk that night. Oh, I dreaded that phone call. All through the bedtime ritual, I thought: Dear God, what is she going to tell me? I feared the worst. I prepared my heart. I thought about that need to hold both the sorrow and the joy, the beautiful and the broken, in one hand, all at once. I prayed for courage to walk with her through the worst.

Instead, that sweet girl called to say it was gone. The most recent set of tests had come back and the cancer was gone. She was clear.

What?! I said. And we laughed and the tears came and she said, Yes. And I said, What?! And she told the story and it was all miracle. Cancer free.

So I’m bringing back Poem-a-Day Friday with this one. It’s rich and hard and gritty in the very best way.

I dedicate it my friend: Cancer-free, baby! (It’s time to throw that party.)

The History of Red

BY LINDA HOGAN

First

there was some other order of things

never spoken

but in dreams of darkest creation.

Then there was black earth,

lake, the face of light on water.

Then the thick forest all around

that light,

and then the human clay

whose blood we still carry

rose up in us

who remember caves with red bison

painted in their own blood,

after their kind.

A wildness

swam inside our mothers,

desire through closed eyes,

a new child

wearing the red, wet mask of birth,

delivered into this land

already wounded,

stolen and burned

beyond reckoning.

Red is this yielding land

turned inside out

by a country of hunters

with iron, flint and fire.

Red is the fear

that turns a knife back

against men, holds it at their throats,

and they cannot see the claw on the handle,

the animal hand

that haunts them

from some place inside their blood.

So that is hunting, birth,

and one kind of death.

Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.

Red was the infinite fruit

of stolen bodies.

The doctors wanted to know

what invented disease

how wounds healed

from inside themselves

how life stands up in skin,

if not by magic.

They divined the red shadows of leeches

that swam in white bowls of water:

they believed stars

in the cup of sky.

They cut the wall of skin

to let

what was bad escape

but they were reading the story of fire

gone out

and that was a science.

As for the animal hand on death’s knife,

knives have as many sides

as the red father of war

who signs his name

in the blood of other men.

And red was the soldier

who crawled

through a ditch

of human blood in order to live.

It was the canal of his deliverance.

It is his son who lives near me.

Red is the thunder in our ears

when we meet.

Love, like creation,

is some other order of things.

Red is the share of fire

I have stolen

from root, hoof, fallen fruit.

And this was hunger.

Red is the human house

I come back to at night

swimming inside the cave of skin

that remembers bison.

In that round nation

of blood

we are all burning,

red, inseparable fires

the living have crawled

and climbed through

in order to live

so nothing will be left

for death at the end.

This life in the fire, I love it.

I want it,

this life.

Poem-a-Day Friday: Linda Hogan

The History of Red

Linda Hogan, “The History of Red” from The Book of Medicines. Copyright © 1993 by Linda Hogan.

Source: The Book of Medicines (Coffee House Press, 1993)