When a walk to the coffee shop takes a poetic detour

You never know what you’ll discover when you go to get your fix

Living in Seattle, and working from home, I drink too much coffee.

Mostly, I make it myself. At times, I’ll stroll to the coffee shop. I don’t like working in such places, but I do like walking to them – the clean air blowing off the Cascade mountains, the sanity-saving screen break. An opportunity for micro-exploration.

Recently, I noticed what appeared to be a letter box nailed to the wall of a house. Free poems – take one, read a sign. Inside, was a clear plastic envelope half full of sheets of A4 paper on which had been printed a poem, “The Child”.

The first verse read:

The dowser of imps is come
Sweet sensor of the lively underground
In fat pink wrapping trussed and swaddled
Drawn across the secret range
At bosom height.

The poem was written by Guy Holliday, a former naval intelligence officer, who moved back to Seattle in 2005 and who, for the past dozen years, has been writing a new poem every month and putting it in the box attached to his garden wall. The Child was July’s poem.

Holliday, 65, told me he had always written poems but came up with the idea of giving them away after seeing a similar “poetry box” put up by a school teacher, who filled it with the work of well-known poets, as well as some of her own. He originally published them on a blog, but discovered more people will stop and collect hard copies – an average of 140 a month – than the 100 or so people who visited his website.

Sometimes, he said, people placed their own poems in the box, or even a gift card for coffee with a thank you note. Once, some children had put in the box a poem they had inscribed on a thin piece of bark, a treasure he has kept.

“The idea for the mailbox really came from my wife, Cathy,” he said. “She knew I was better with a deadline. So if it’s the 28th of the month and my thoughts are still circulating, I know I have to focus.”

Holliday said he writes about what he sees. The Child was written when his daughter was heavily pregnant. Three weeks ago she gave birth to a boy; she named the child Guy, after her father. “So the next poem, the one I put in for August, will be about my first grandson,” he said.

Often the simple poetry of life beats any caffeine high.

Yours,

Andrew Buncombe

Chief US correspondent