message in a bottle

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the - not always greatly hopeful -belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are underway: they are making toward something. ~ Paul Celan

Imagine you have gone down to the shore and there, amidst the other debris..you find an unlikely looking bottle from the past. You bring it home and discover a message inside. This letter, so strange and disturbing, seems to have been making its way toward someone for a long time, and now that someone turns out to be you...

~ Edward Hirsch

At a critical moment, a seafarer tosses a sealed bottle into the ocean waves, containing his name and a message detailing his fate. Wandering along the dunes many years later, I happen upon it in the sand. I read the message, note the date, the last will and testament of one who has passed on. I have the right to do so. I have not opened someone elses's mail. The message in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means, I have become it's secret addresse. ~ Osip Mandelstam

...and thus it is for all of us who read poems.

Quotations assembled by Edward Hirsch in How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry.

Artwork ~ "Seaside Summer" by Vitali Komarov