Angelus
by: Billy Collins
Church bells
from across the water--
a breeze blows
the letter I was reading
into the lake.
People don't write letters anymore. They email. Text. Send snaps. Communication these days is instantaneous. Unless you're standing on the summit of Mount Everest or diving to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, you can get in touch with practically anybody in the time it takes to sneeze.
I come from a letter-writing generation. Maybe the last letter-writing generation. If I went on vacation, I sent home postcards. When my girlfriend (now wife) and I were separated while I was in grad school in Kalamazoo, I wrote long letters to her every day. Sad letters. Sexy letters. Joyful letters. Angry letters. It was how I kept myself connected with my distant love.
We've lost something in this social media age. It takes me maybe 30 seconds to send a text ("Can you bring my car keys with you when you come to the church?"). It takes even less time to answer a text ("K" or "Yes" or a thumbs up emoji). Writing a letter takes time and thought and a more than a little creativity. It also takes a person who can read and write cursive (a rarer and rarer skill these days).
Perhaps I'm old fashioned. Maybe I'm a Luddite. But I get more excited about receiving a handwritten letter or card than any email or text Electronic communications are transitory. Here today, deleted tomorrow Yesterday, I took a book off my shelf and opened it up. Inside, I found a birthday card from a good friend who has been dead close to ten years.
As I read the words he'd scribbled inside the card in his tall, thin script, it was like he was right there with me. I could actually hear his laugh followed by the watery intake of breath that always followed it.
That's not something you can get from an antiseptic, autocorrected electronic message. It's something
living. Breathing. Like a poem.
And Saint Marty will take a poem over a text any day.
Birthday Card
by: Martin Achatz
from a dead friend,
found in the pages
of Leaves of Grass,
mixing with
the beer and peanuts
of Whitman's breath.
