I got a lot of postcards and enjoyed the cards themselves and the words written on them. Some of the poems were striking, one gave me chills (in a good way) and all made the connection we all hope for: I sat down and came up with these words to send you, a thought, an image, a rant, a mysterious string of ideas… put them on this card, put your address and a stamp on it and sent it off into the world.

Sometimes you get an acknowledgement that the card arrived, sometimes a response from the recipient to the poem itself, but I never get too tied up about that. Postcards can go in different directions way too easily. One thing happened this year that may not have happened before, someone in the postal handling part of the postcard’s journey wrote a response on the card. Pretty sure they weren’t agreeing with the sentiment but wow – wrote on the card. That card took about a week or more to get to me, so I’m not sure if they pondered it for a few days or if it just took that long.

Be that as it may, my own August Journey was pretty smooth. I had written down a list of words to act as prompts in case nothing came to mind in the hour of writing. Sometimes in the past I’ve used a group of haiku as my fall-back on hard nights. This year a theme developed, not of my choosing, around the idea of “a place to stand” and it popped up over and over again in different ways. One night I started writing and came out with something that ended up 75 lines. Way too big for a postcard, even in its beginning. I excerpted it for the card.

A good month, now I’m ready to do other things. Stand by for photos and painting and travel and who knows what else.