Goodbye, August! Goodnight, Moon!

Goodbye, August, on this first day of September! And goodbye, August Poetry Postcards, a wonderful project supported by and Concrete Wolf and Lana Hechtman Ayers and guided by Paul Nelson.

You can learn more about the poetry postcards project, annually in August, at their blog, where you can also keep up with the weather in Auburn, Washington, and the current phase of the moon.

The new moon for the new month was a little earlier this week, and September begins with a waxing crescent!

I did write and send out 31 short poems on postcards, one a day for August, though I started a little early, as recommended, in late July, working around a week in Michigan. Postcards were surprisingly hard to find, compared to their abundance in my youth, on traveling vacations, but I got a bunch of art & photography postcards all at once at The Garlic Press, a kitchen and gift shop in my town.

As suggested, I did write about place and in response to the card's image, but this always mixed with whatever was going on right in front of me.  So "place" often turned into my back yard, its gardens, along with the postcard image, and sometimes also my reading.  For instance, here is "Omnivore," clearly influenced by The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, and also in response to William Eggleston's color photograph of a man in Memphis, TN eating a fast-food hamburger circa 1965-68. (You can find the image here in Monographs, the Los Alamos book samples.)

Omnivore

Snip his fingernail
and you'll find
he's eating corn, born of corn,

singing corn in the cottony south.
The chickens ate corn, the cow;
the fish are taught to love corn.
And you'll wail
along to his corny country song,
red, white, and blue.

This wouldn't be strictly true circa 1965-68, but it would pertain since 1980, and to a fast-food hamburger meal eaten by an omnivorous country singer now. Also under the influence of reading, I created a female superhero named Nitrogenia!

It was fun, as fellow postcard poet and workshop participant Candace says, to send the poems off with no pressure at all to be perfect. And wonderful to connect to other poets by pen and stamp!

I received, and am still receiving, postcard poems from people in the Northwest, Canada, California, and New Jersey. And Candace, here in the corny Midwest.

Thanks to ESO and Andy Strappazzon for the crescent moon. Thanks to Tomruen  for the animated moon. (If it's not moving, click it!)  Goodnight, moon!