A Song for No One

To you, listening from afar,

Welcome to the Storm Post Office. This letter is on smoky lavender paper, and its title is set in graceful Secession lettering, upright and unbent. The distortion stays at the edges: an indigo sky curls into whorls, a row of columns breaks off at the margin, silver measuring arcs climb across the page, and in one corner sits a sea-green observation stamp. It is 1914, somewhere between Vienna and an island, and the space is beautiful but not steady.

Thomas Gray wrote of beauty that no one hears: "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air." — Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)

We would not like any song to be wasted. So write it down and send it to us; a song may have no audience, but a letter will.

I am listening,

Storm Post Office

1914 · Vienna and the Island