The date sweeps across the top
of this postcard from the Berkshires,
unfurled like a famous name
on the Declaration of Independence.

It’s a proud penmanship, written for
remembrance, its loops and lines
sweeping, not creeping, across the card,
its sender hoping to be noticed. 

On the front a colorfully painted scene
of a motor car rumbling across
a stone bridge over the Deerfield River,
the “modern-day Mohawk Trail” – back then.

“I’ve been over a good part of the U.S.,”
Carpin writes, “but here in the
Berkshire Hills is some of the most
beautiful scenery I ever saw.”

Not that it matters, but elsewhere
that day Germans and British killed
each other along the Menin Road
Ridge in battle-brittle Belgium.

Gotha bombers pummeled London
by night, their pterodactyl wingspans
grasping the sky as gunners in forward
cockpits fired from the creatures’ eyes.