When the offer came in from Carla Shafer to join a project of poetry postcards for the month of February, I did not hesitate, got on the participant list (@#4), put a notice on the August Poetry Postcard Fest Facebook page, got some stamps and watched the postcards roll in. (I have 23 so far, March 6th.)

February is as far from August as can be, so it seemed a perfect way to take advantage of the 400 or so postcards I have ready for the August Poetry Postcard Fest, which enters its tenth year this August. And the added theme was something I felt I could easily work with, given that I feel the very act of writing poetry is itself an act of community-building and, thus, peace. The Scott Peck quote I used to open a blog post on that very topic (Postcard Poems as Peace Process) still applies:

There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.

As does a paragraph in that post demonstrating the link between the poetry postcard project and peace:

It is an effort to learn about other cultures, to be creative and vulnerable. To reach out to strangers in a peaceful and imaginative way. To give them a sense of my August priorities which, this year were about, among other things: our p-patch community garden; dancing in the kitchen with my 17 month old daughter; and taking a Moroccan poet and Beat scholar to the top of a mountain in a nearby national park and expose him to some of the other beautiful things about life here.

So I gathered my best Scott Peck quotes and used a few of those as epigraphs for the Postcards for Peace project and I present the poems here in one swell foop. I will not be posting them (agonizingly for some folks) drip by postcard drip for the next few months, but do feel I’ll be more than ready come the 4th of July to get back to the Grandaddy postcard project of them all. Thanks Carla.