i
All your letters. All those years. How I miss them.
Barely able to join up writing, I first wrote
then back came familiar hands from the home front.
Neat and neatly folded within. Everything  gummed,
licked into shape. Rectangles with triangular flaps
and slits just wide enough to slice
or tear with hurried thumbs. Eager exchanges, 
batted back and forth like battledore.
Letters from home, as food to a prisoner.

ii
Even as prisoner, the apostle Paul wrote
epistles, great tracts of guidance 
covering distances he'd already covered.
We travellers have squeezed words on cards
brief and rhetorical, or bottle rolled
and thrown them to the will of Neptune.
At best now come your messages as text
Abbreviated further:  SMS shorthand
Or just a symbolic face.

iii
Dear One. Your everyday face has almost vanished
from recall. With all its many moods, its ageing
Only that up-all-night expression you once wore
is forged forever. Slipping me your poem as letter:-

"Lovely as you struggle into wakefulness
you in your crumpled first-of-the-day face
turn away. Trying for composure... 
Pulling on again the mask of self-concealment.
Grudgingly you admit the day and my love.

iv
Your love and letters I have treasured. But those others,
those ersatz tracts that thrilled and filled the distances, 
all torn to shreds. For in the end only loved ones can send love,
concluding missives with it, with all of it, or with fondest...
How I miss those writings and that simple combination of
just four letters.

For my MTB prompt: Letters in a Poem we are writing an epistolary poem, choosing either The Verse Epistle or the more free verse style Prose poem. ,