Poetry Postcard 28: Symbolic Stamps

Happy President’s Day! If you’ve been following the Poetry Postcard Project, you know that I share a birthday with President George Washington, 2/22. (More about that shared birthday on Friday.)

 

Postcard #28 was one of the original 17 cards I bought from an Ellicott City antique shop. (Postcard #30, posted for Valentine’s Day, is by the same company.)

Originally, I was drawn to this card by the bright colors and the 40s cartoon style. It’s a little goofy. However, when I pulled the card, what drew me into the poem was on the back of the card. It came pre-stamped, and that stamp (George Washington, BTW, President’s Day celebrants), was on the postcard upside down. That rang a bell.

From the time I was ten years old through part of middle school, I went to summer camp in New York’s Catskill mountains. Camp lasted for eight weeks. Getting and sending mail was a big deal -- our best and only way of staying in touch with friends and family. Cool stationery was a status symbol, and something to trade on a rainy day.

What I remembered from camp was this: placing a stamp upside down on a letter means “I love you.”

When and how did that originate? According to About.com’s article on stamps, it began during the Victorian era.

Here's the code, borrowed from the About.com article:

"Upside down: I love you.
Sideways, head right: Love and kisses.
Sideways, head left: I'll never leave you.
Diagonal to the right: Marry me?
Diagonal to the left: Yes, I'll marry you."

But the website said there is a different if the stamp has a flag. “If you see an upside down flag stamp on an envelope today, it may be an echo of the unpopular Viet Nam war, when protesters used the gimmick as a method of protest,” John Finch writes in the article.

My postcard poem for today is in the voice of a wartime sweetheart, writing to a soldier. The opening borrows lines from the front of the postcard.

1 Cent Stamp, Upside Down

Why don’t you write?

Long time no see!

Are you stateside

or overseas?

I heard that wives
use an old trick --
inverting stamps

with one damp lick.

A flag would mean,
if upside down,
I hate the war
because you’re gone.
My stamp is plain.
I’m not your wife,

but I love you

with all my life.

Laura Shovan

For another poem of protest, visit www.newversenews.com. Postcard Poem #41, “Greetings from Fort McClellan” was featured at the current events poetry journal yesterday. I'll blog about the poem next week.

Curious about President's Day? KidzWorld.com has an article about the holiday's origins.

Poems to Protest BP & Other Environmental Disasters

How easy it is to get caught up in our own lives. We spent yesterday evening dashing from one kid's music lessons to the other kid's band concert, squeezing pizza and homework in between.

Today, I'm stopping my mom-routine to think about the B.P Oil disaster. Bill Cowee's poem, "She Said to Be Careful of the Thistle," reminded me of the natural and human cost to big industry.

She Said To Be Careful of the Thistle

by Bill Cowee

He looked down at the weed, a strong,
stiff spear of bristled green
crowned brilliant with lavender,
growing unabated at the tailing’s base,
amid the crushed rock souped once
in chemical baths for bright blue copper.
New leachers come again to work the rock
carcasses, shovel the piles apart, crush
larger rock into smaller, heap leach the bones
with sulfuric acids to get the last profit
out of the earth before it is discarded again.
And aerial spraying, sulfuric odor
acrid as on a drive through Hell,
the residents below the last reef of ore
suddenly come with asthma, with nose bleeds,
and the sprayers...shush, shush, shush
as if fighting for breath themselves...or truth.


Read the rest of the poem here. 

Here's a fact that I found shocking: "At the time Henry Ford and the Duryea brothers were racing to put gasoline-powered cars on the road, electric cars were already in use. The first practical electric car in the United States was introduced in 1835, but it was basically a small locomotive. Advances in batteries over the next 50 years made the car more attractive, and by 1897 electric taxis roamed the streets of New York."

This is from an article, "Green Living," written by my buddy Jennifer Della Zanna.

So -- what happened? How did we go from electric car technology to oil-dependent society? And why not go back to that earlier technology for ideas?