I never really wrote
or received
letters.
By the time I was old enough,
correspondence via post was mostly over.
My generation put down pen and page
and began to share life digitally.
Of course,
I wrote and received
notebooks of notes in school
from girlhood comrades
and poured over puzzling punctuation
in my yearbook
from lamborghini loving boys.
But not day to day letters,
like my mother received
from her mother Dolly
about lazy days of Florida rest
or holiday turkey scandals (dry).
I resolve and conceive a lot
in writing and reading,
both in my head and in my heart.
And so perhaps I think I’m behind
in my intellectual and emotional sorting.
And that’s one reason
I write poems and brief writings ~
so that I may catch up
to where I might be
in a world still with letters.

I didn’t attend the funeral,
but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. – Mark Twain

What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. – Liz Carpenter

One of my favorite historical letters, written by American Civil War officer Sullivan Ballou to his wife Sarah, can be viewed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_Ballou

image: Mark Twain, 1835-1910, biography.com