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Red Right Returning

On Lord Byron’s birthday we remember
the alliteration within navigation
from big bodies of water into small,
of keeping red daymarks to starboard
and leaving the green shallows to port.
It’s the same with safe weather and love:
Red skies at night are a sailor’s delight
while darkness is in the realm of the other.
And so much the same with the rules of life
and happiness well taught by your mother
keep to the sun and ride plenty of water.

—
Michael Salcman is the former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, and numerous other journals. His books include Poetry in Medicine, an anthology of medical poems; A Prague Spring (winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize); Shades & Graces (Danial Hoffman Book Prize winner); Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems; and, most recently, Crossing the Tape.

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