Postmarks: The Taste of Envelopes, the Taste of Hope
by Katherine Hagopian Berry
courtesy of Belfast Poetry Festival
So much of my poetry life hangs on one Honorable Mention, fifth place, in the 2017 Belfast Poetry Festival Postmark Poetry Competition. It’s a bit too easy to get separated from yourself: the girl in North Carolina writing poems on the steps of Caldwell Hall. It’s too short a distance between writing every morning and an unpublished poetry thesis and everything next, graduate school, jobs, kids, one move and then another and another and another, until I was sitting on the floor of my husband’s office holding the first poems I had written that year in my hand. In those days you mailed them in with an address you had copied from an ad in the local paper and a cover letter—so risky—paper submissions, gummy and imperfect, the taste and smell of large manilla envelopes like hope. When I found out I had actually placed, I was back at home, on the faded rug of my family room, so weak with joy I couldn’t even remember how to stand.
The Belfast Poetry Festival held their reading in a middle school cafeteria, and those poets and artists had enough magic to make cafeteria tables and steam trays all shine luminous. When poetry is alive everyone sings a little brighter and sounds a little sweeter, connections spin out like beams of light. I will never forget my walk up to the scratched veneer of the podium, like reentering a childhood bedroom, like finding diamonds you thought long vanished under your pillow. I will never forget what it felt like to read that poem. My mother once said, waking up after cataract surgery, she realized she had forgotten the real color of things. That’s Belfast for me: I rediscovered the color of things and found the courage to start writing with diligence again. It takes such courage to write and even more courage to show that writing to the world, and it takes such a correspondingly small moment of seeing to alchemize all that longing into a new life. Everything after that, the Balancing Act II anthology, the amazing community of Maine poets I found through Littoral Books, my involvement with the Writing the Land Project, four books, even this essay, I owe to those that saw me when I needed it most. From my heart to yours, thank you.
Katherine Hagopian Berry has appeared in the Café Review, Enough: Poems of Resistance and Protest, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, Balancing Act II: An Anthology of Poetry by Fifty Maine Women and has been a finalist at the Belfast Poetry Festival. Her collections of poetry include Mast Year (Littoral Books, 2020; Orbit (Toad Hall Editions, 2023; and LandTrust (2024) and HandFast (2025), both from NatureCulture.
