I am not a farmer. Barely a keeper of house plants, but I’ve heard some things and I’ve read other things about letting a field go fallow. Or planting a cover crop of rye or clover. Whatever the process and the terms, the analogy of letting lay to inspire a future season of fertility -if one is feeling generous- is a suitable fit for what happened to the postcards I send out annually in celebration of National Poetry Month.

They are in a fallow field. That field being my mind.

You see, for possibly a decade, I’ve mailed poem postcards to family, friends, and folks I’m cultivating for friendship. I call them poemcards. I started small -a few poemcards in the month of April, containing a short poem and the inscription: Happy Nat’l Poetry Month! xoxPhoebe. Every year I added more addresses, scoured anthologies, until finally I was stretching to send out nearly forty postcards in a month. Handwritten or cut-n-paste, it took a lot of effort.

This year: nada. The desire was more a soft wind; every time I turned my head, it was gone. Between the busyness of work and life, Ladies Rock Camp Boston, and a slow recovery from winter, the seeds of my annual celebration drowned.

So. A lament, then a hope for next year. In the meantime: