Poetry Sunday

I don't do New Year's Resolutions any more, having decades of experience with not following through on them, but to the extent that I have good intentions, my big one for 2021 is to write more letters. I wrote 99 of them in 2020, including 25 to my three members of Congress, and I intend to write more to family, friends, and elected officials in the coming year. I think of it not only as doing more to stay in contact with the world, but also as my small part of helping to fix the damage deliberately inflicted on the Postal Service by Der Furor and his horrendous Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy.

For today, my first Poetry Sunday of 2012, I thought this poem on the subject of letters by Carrie Shipers would be appropriate ...

In your next letter,

by Carrie Shipers

                                           please describe

the weather in great detail. If possible,

enclose a fist of snow or mud,

everything you know about the soil,

how tomato leaves rub green against

your skin and make you itch, how slow

the corn is growing on the hill.

Thank you for the photographs

of where the chicken coop once stood,

clouds that did not become tornadoes.

When I try to explain where I’m from,

people imagine corn bread, cast-iron,

cows drifting across grass. I interrupt

with barbed wire, wind, harvest air

that reeks of wheat and diesel.

I hope your sleep comes easy now

that you’ve surrendered the upstairs,

hope the sun still lets you drink

one bitter cup before its rise. I don’t miss

flannel shirts, radios with only

AM stations, but there’s a certain kind

of star I can’t see from where I am—

bright, clear, unconcerned. I need

your recipes for gravy, pie crust,

canned green beans. I’m sending you

the buttons I can’t sew back on.

Please put them in the jar beside your bed.

In your next letter, please send seeds

and feathers, a piece of bone or china

you plowed up last spring. Please

promise I’m missing the right things.

Have a good day, and resolve to write a more letters this year ... to your elected reprehensives, your family and friends, and me. It will make that daily trek out to the mailbox more enjoyable.

Happy New Year; more thoughts coming.

Bilbo