POSTCARD POEMS AND THE ART OF FINDING THE CARDS

§

Six, count 'em, six cards arrived today! I love the way August keeps insinuating itself into September.

Here's my incoming wall now:

I've been doing this August poem thing since Paul and Lana dreamed it up in 2007 and I've now got quite a collection of cards. More than I'll ever use in this lifetime, but I love them and am always interested in discovering a new source.

Postcards are not very hard to come by. You can usually find a rack or a stack of them by check-out counters in drugstores, gas stations, book stores, you name it. Hotels have them in drawers, along side the Gideon's. Artists and writers get them made up as a form of networking. This year two of the people on my list got cards with poems by Vancouver Island poet Wendy Morton on them—two for the price of one stamp, if you will. 

Whenever I go to Vancouver I like to take a trip to Granville Island so I can stock up on bookmaking supplies at Paper Ya. Imagine my surprise when, in the same building, I discovered The Postcard Place,  a little shop that is devoted to selling postcards! That's where I found the box with pictures of the first thirty Nancy Drew covers. And this year I found a box of Darth Vader and Son cards, a couple of which went out last month and I'm sending them sporadically to my grandson who is very into Star Wars right now. And then there's the box of Onion headline cards I got on one of my forages. 

But probably my most diverse cards have come to me from Nancy Lee, my amazing English aunt who died last year a few weeks after her 102nd birthday. Nancy loved to travel, and, I discovered when I was dismantling her dozens of photograph albums, in addition to taking lots of pictures, she loved to buy postcards of the places she visited. Consequently, I now have cards from Turkey, and Afghanistan, Egypt and Syria, all over Western Europe and the UK, several countries in Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. 

Oh, and occasionally I take a blank card and colour it with pencils. One of these years I want to get a little fancier about making my own, but meanwhile...

Here are some more of the cards I sent out this year:

“wherever I go
            I hear them
            I see them.”

                                    Ghassan Zaqtan

            There is no barrier

            so great we cannot

            pass through, laughing

            at time’s inconsequential
            digs and yes, sometimes

            its anger. We are

            alone, yet not.

                        Shouting in

                        silence.

“Some of the

            animals will die and be tasted

            and fear it.”

                                    Jennifer Maiden

            She said, ‘You are my rock’

            but who believed her

            when only the shadows of the moon

            spilled against the impossible

            could rouse her. Such faint

            and rugged rinds the orange

            leaves at the bottom of the

            bowl. How sad the truth

            the cat dragged in. A

            favored trinket clutched, a

            newborn’s cry. How telling.

“But not today, not now,

                                                not ever again.”

                                    Alan Shapiro

            A lifting of the chin

            a glance, a little smile

            —eye contact!

            So we drop deeper

            into trust

            So begins the wonder

            of a sip, a slip, a shudder,

            til it’s gone, we look away,

            and nothing’s changed

            but everything.     

“That loud hub of us,

            meat stub of us, beating us

            senseless.”

Brenda Shaughnessy

 Trot out the words, tell them where to go,

            herd them into lines of long ago.

            Search the empty cavern for a clue

            you don’t know how to write—and then you do.

           

            Whether or not it’s noble to be kind

            you need to try, or quick be left behind.

            These unplanned rhymes arrive from who knows where,

            enough to rouse a hibernating bear.

            You know the sort—he’ll eat your garden through

            till all that’s left’s a faded rose for you.

      

            “Success goes hand in hand with shame

            but failure has a nobler sort of name.”

                                    David W. McFadden

      All the colours are there

            in that joyful rainbow flag

            —red, of course,

                 for the bloody mouth,

            —green for the three-day-old

                 bruise on the cheek

                 (blue for the new one)

            —yellow for the cowardice

            that craves the fist,

            the stick, the bottle’s

            jagged edge, all in the name

            of what’s natural.           

This one's dedicated to Heather Dale who I met back in 1991 in the same writing class where I met my husband and whose writing left me with several very distinct images, including one that came out in this poem.  

“Some nights I stand before my bookcase,

            touching the spines.”  James Pollock

            Once I knew a writer who said

            her poetry books were cowboys,

            lean and sexy, something like that.

            Today I made my way

            to the secondhand store,

            found the poetry section

            couched, deliberately, in the back.

            When I knew no one was watching

            I slid my fingers down a spine or two,

            felt the ones that breathed back,

            took them away with me

            so they can have their ways with me

            later, and later, and later.

“Right. None of this happened

            overnight, you understand. Right.”

                                    Ian Williams

            And what if we could

            talk to animals, and they’d reply,

            what if the world we think

            we know is no world at all,

            just a conglomeration of thoughts

            we choose to think, thoughts

            that soar and plummet,

            dig and die, while all around us

            sleep the innocent, the fond,

            the foolish, and what of us—

            what chance have we

            to dream the right thing.

§