Charles Bane Jr’s most recent poem to appear here was When Masai Raise Spearheads (May 2014).

Letter to Ernest Hemingway
By Charles Bane Jr

Dear Ernest,

I live near enough the sea to write, and send the sunlight that here remains unchanged. Unchanged also are the birds and the flow of new words from that place you always stood, not sat, to behold.

Ernest, there are drugs now that would let you conquer the evil of the mind that forced your father and you to suicide. You would let go of him. You would write, again, and perhaps Castro would let you reopen the Finca Vigia, where everything’s untouched. Papa, the sea is waiting with marlin and sailfish that rise from the waves like gods. The corsairs of fishermen are making their way home as I write at six pm. You would rest well, and the next day, start. It would be like Paris again on your pages, linen fresh like the clouds that follow hurricanes in mounds of a world new made.

Write, Papa. Write about the plants hurrying up to higher air to escape the changing climate and the guns firing senselessly and new uniforms and always waiting young. I love you, Papa, I smell the salt in the air at the north end of my island home where the water goes into the Atlantic. I skip stones. I write and read. I watch time strike off, like a match, paragraphs of hours.

Make Cuba home, or Florida, or a city unexplored. And when you’re settled, let me know.

Always,
Charles