The Lost Postcard

This weeks post is introduced by poet Susan Darlington, who recently visited the Mexborough Read to Write group, and left us with a challenge...

May 04, 2025

A postcard from Ewart goes missing in transit. It is delivered 121 years later to the correct address but with Miss Lydia Davies, the intended recipient, long since dead.

The story is written as simple human interest on BBC News but presented as a writing prompt it was taken in many different directions. The task was straightforward - use the news story as a springboard for a poem – yet the creative ways in which people responded were by turns moving, unexpected, and filled with yearning.

Four key themes emerged across the 10 pieces. The overwhelming one was the imagined consequence of the postcard never being received. ‘Intermezzo - Unending Strife’ pictures a ‘lonely widow’ who died while, “waiting news from her boy soldier.” ’Lost Opportunity’ envisages how the missing postcard, “changed the lives for those involved.” In ‘Missing’ the intended recipient of the card is, “disappointed you have not written.”

There’s pathos in many of these pieces but ‘Train Ride To The Seaside’ and ‘The Challenge’ offer humour and mystery respectively. The former presents a dialogue in which Ewart’s ‘jolly postcard’ to his girlfriend goes missing. When she accuses him of cheating, he retorts that next time he goes to the coast, he’ll “take Miss Gilbert out instead.” The latter brings unanswered intrigue, with the recipient instructed to, “steam off the ha’penny stamp” to reveal words that, “only you can ever read.”

Factual details from the news item were incorporated into several pieces. In ‘A Postcard From The Past’ the missive was delivered to, “the right house / But it was hundred or more years too late.” Three also pick up on the original postcard’s message, in which Ewart apologises that he cannot pick up a ‘pair’ of an unknown item (“A pair of what we’ll never know,” as ‘The Postcard’ acknowledges).

Other pieces were inspired purely by the method of communication, creating imagined scenarios. ‘Mail’ is a shaggy dog story in which a message in a bottle is swallowed by, “a Great White Shark / running amok off Tallahassee bay.” ‘Germany 1943’ imagines a Prisoner of War (PoW) writing to his sweetheart (“I dream of getting back home and we can make plans for our wedding”). ‘Gibts Nicht’ is set in a time when, “The Earl of Beaconsfield / hosted exchanges / Christmas ’73.”

Another theme was historical context. ‘Missing’ imagines a time when post was efficiently delivered, “to the farthest flung reaches of the Empire,” and ‘The Challenge’ refers to a “portrait of the King.” ‘The Postcard’ touches on events between the card being posted and its eventual delivery (“… two world wars / and the silences between”).

These world events are more explicitly explored in ‘Germany 1943’ and ‘Intermezzo - Unending Strife’. The former describes life as a PoW (“It is just about bearable for us, the Brits, but they treat the Russians terribly”), while in the latter the postcard is taken as police evidence following a suffragette attack on a post-box (“green, purple and white / explosion of female demands”).

A final key theme was the way in which all the poems viewed the postcard as a way to communicate love, either romantic or familial. Two hinted at a time when loved ones would be reunited; ‘A Postcard From The Past’ speculates that, “one day we shall be here together,” and ‘Lost Opportunity’ offers, “Harmony connection to reunite.” These were the closest to the real life outcome of the news story, in which the postcard reunited long-lost family members.

Yet no matter how the postcard prompt was interpreted, each poem carried a uniquely creative voice. Taken together, they are fantastically diverse conversation of ideas that circle back to one single source. Thank you to everyone who took the time to write and submit a piece.

Susan Darlington