A wet day, a poncho and a trip to the post office: on paper there is hardly anything to Ernesto Priego's poem, which is why it works so well. He builds it from small errands and lets a mood rise out of them. First comes the tired comedy of getting through a grey day, then, right at the end, a pocket of stillness in an unexpected place.
The opening is almost telegraphic. "Gloomy day. Ceaseless rain." has no verbs at all, like a note scribbled in a diary. "Walk like a blue ghost" then drops its subject, as if the speaker is too damp to bother with grammar. The pronouns drift as the poem goes on, from "you" to "I", and then a quiet "we" slips in with "We walk back". The poem never says who that companion is. The effect is of a mind talking to itself and only gradually noticing it isn't alone.
The humour is dry and self-mocking. The poncho makes the walker look like "a tired, // retired superhero", and the stanza break leaves "tired" hanging before "retired" arrives as a near-echo. It is the closest the poem comes to rhyme. Otherwise this is free verse with short, plain lines, mostly quatrains with two tercets, and the rhythm follows speech more than any pattern. Even the rabbits get a deadpan line: they are "hiding underground: / they know better." Sensible creatures stay out of the rain, and the speaker does not.
The middle of the poem turns to modern routine. He moves "from one concrete building / to the other", changing "titillating / screens a million times". "Titillating" is a teasing, slightly absurd word for a screen, and "a million times" captures the numb exhaustion of endless scrolling. Against this comes the post office, where 68p "go away", as though money simply evaporates, "on a piece of paper / with the face of a future king". The line break after "paper" deflates the monarchy into a small sticky square. The pence, the red postbox and the royal face all suggest Britain, judging by the imagery, though the poem never says so.
The postbox is the strangest image. It becomes a "red totem... opening its mouth", and the short, blunt "It devours" turns an ordinary street object into an idol that is fed with offerings. In a world of screens, posting a letter starts to look like an old ritual.
The turn comes with "printed words on paper / in the bag." We never learn what these words say, and that withholding matters. The speaker only tells us that "the more I read them the more I feel / like walking like a blue ghost / under the rain." This repeats the poem's opening image, so the structure loops back on itself. The words do not comfort or settle him. They make him want to go back out into the weather, and the ghost, first a joke, becomes a chosen state of mind.
Then the rain "stops // for a moment", and the stanza break enacts the pause. "Absolute peace" answers "Ceaseless rain" with another adjective that admits no exceptions, and for a moment the second one wins. The source of that peace is surprising: "Only the sound of / a computer, breathing." Personification gives the machine a pulse, which could be tender or faintly eerie. The walker has been a ghost, and now the computer is the thing that seems alive.
The title, "Added in a postscript", fits the shape of the poem. A postscript is what you tack on after the letter is finished, and the last stanza feels like that, a small afterthought carrying the most weight.
The poem is significant because it refuses the easy consolation of nature. The rabbits hide, the rain returns, and the only calm is domestic and technological, and slightly uncanny. It captures a very recognisable life, shuttling between paper and screens, and finds a strange, quiet beauty there without making a speech about it.