Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 2024 #2

Dear Colette
Amidst the city reduced to heaps of rubble
revenge for one innocent peoples’
centuries of persecution and trouble
now enacted and exacted on another
a child learns resilience from new life
and wonder turns to hope…


I’m sorry this is such a heavy subject to start the season with but sadly it is the world we live in. I appreciated all your comments on my posts last year and was delighted to find you on my list, Colette – Lots of Love, Andrew

The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my second year and I was on List 10. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 16 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent.
Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…

Breaking News and Hearts…

Breaking news and hearts
he’d waited all his life to see the Northern Lights
and when they finally shimmered – he slept through it

Breaking news and hearts
he was her Pole Star
and without him she lost all direction

Breaking news and hearts
the last Polar bear had
no Arctic ice to hunt upon

Breaking news and hearts
she broke the mirror her grandmother
smuggled beyond the reach of the Holocaust

Breaking news and hearts
the baby drove the boy away
and not surely into her arms

Breaking news and hearts
a premmie did not heroically make it
as the movies teach us to expect

Breaking news and hearts
the dead in Gaza top forty thousand
and Zion still hasn’t had its pound of flesh

Breaking news and hearts
another little babe is born
somewhere under the stars…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Created in Midjourney

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Uncategorized invites us to write Zeugmatically. The word zeugma is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses”.