Personified
The Post Office is one of the characters in the opera, The Post Office, from which this poem is taken. The characters also include the ghost of Benjamin Franklin.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
I contain multitudes.
I am the post.
I am the post office.
I am an open door.
FRANK
You enter me the way one enters
a promise. I am the tongue
under the stamp, and the stamp
canceller. I am the envelope.
EMILY
I am Walt Whitman and Mississippi,
Harriet Tubman and Miami,
Boston and Emma Lazarus. I am
Benjamin Franklin, the first post-
master general.
ANNA
I am the truck,
and the driver. I am your letter
and carrier. I am the jet plane.
BEN
I am your confidant, your bishop,
your rabbi, imam. I am the knock
on the door. I will deliver,
in sickness and health, in a deep freeze
and withering heat.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Even as the earth’s axis shifts like a frisbee, the mail
will get where it is expected to go,
I am your right to privacy.
Listen to me, listen to yourselves.
Elaine Sexton is a maker, critic, teacher, and librettist. The Post Office: An Opera in Poems is her sixth collection of poetry, and first libretto, written in collaboration with composer Laura Kaminsky. The Post Office will debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts in May 2026. Her poems are widely anthologized and published in journals including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and O! the Oprah Magazine. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, former senior editor of ARTnews, and visual arts editor for Tupelo Quarterly, her art and book reviews have appeared in Art in America, ARTnews, Art New England, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and On the Seawall. Sexton lives in New York and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. elainesexton.org