Max Reif’s most recent poem to appear here was “Back Then” (August 2016) 

What I Learned From Stamps
By Max Reif

The tall ships
of childhood,
stamps gave me
the world.

My favorite one,
from Italy, showed
a woman with a walled
city atop her head.

There were dazzling triangles
with Finnish bike-racers,
Angolan cheetahs,
Croatian birds!
And how I loved
to whisper that word,
“Croatia…”

The Russians, too,
had bike racers,
leaning intensely forward;
and many men
with long, white beards.

I learned strange words:
‘Magyar’ and ‘Norge,’
like the refrigerator brand
at Dad’s store.

España was a lovely word
for a place whose stamps
were filled with the big head
of a man named Franco,
of which I had copies in red
orange, brown and violet.

I learned that
stamps mattered
the day Grandpa
made me cross out
all the pictures of Hitler
but not the small ones
of General von Hindenburg
on the ones that said
Deutsches-Reich.

Stamps were
an absolute democracy,
tiny San Marino
equal to the great
United States;

and I learned of
the Cape of Good Hope!
the Cape of Good Hope—
and still hope
to round it someday.

When a distant cousin
in the diplomatic corps
sent us a card
from Tanganyika,
Mother helped me steam
the orange stamp off,
and I felt as if I’d received
a piece of the land itself!

Geography was cutting edge
to a boy. I wrote the President
of Pakistan, “Is the capital
Lahore or Rawalpindi?”
and he actually wrote back
in his own hand, “Rawalpindi.”
Of course, I peeled off the stamp.

I wrote to Kwame Nkruma,
father of the new country, Ghana,
too, and felt most indignant
when he never replied!

I was beginning to exercise
my power in the world
that I was piecing together—
creating, really—
through stamps
and imagination.